During the days when Snapchat’s popularity was booming, investors thought the company would become the anchor for a new Los Angeles technology scene.
Snapchat, they hoped, would spin-off entrepreneurs and angel investors who would reinvest in the local ecosystem and create new companies that would in turn foster more wealth, establishing LA as a hub for tech talent and venture dollars on par with New York and Boston.
In the ensuing years, Los Angeles and its entrepreneurial talent pool has captured more attention from local and national investors, but it’s not Snap that’s been the source for the next generation of local founders. Instead, several former SpaceX employees have launched a raft of new companies, capturing the imagination and dollars of some of the biggest names in venture capital.
“There was a buzz, but it doesn’t quite have the depth of bench of people that investors wanted it to become,” says one longtime VC based in the City of Angels. “It was a company in LA more than it was an LA company.”
Perhaps the most successful SpaceX offshoot is Relativity Space, founded by Jordan Noone and Tim Ellis. Since Noone, a former SpaceX engineer, and Ellis, a former Blue Origin engineer, founded their company, the business has been (forgive the expression) a rocket ship. Over the past four years, Relativity has raised $185.7 million, received special dispensations from NASA to test its rockets at a facility in Mississippi, will launch vehicles from Cape Canaveral and has signed up an early customer in Momentus, which provides satellite tug services in orbit.
Relativity, a new star in the space race, raises $140 million for its 3-D printed rockets
Relativity isn’t the first company from former SpaceX engineers to raise big dollars. That distinction goes to Hyperloop One, the company looking to commercialize transportation technology popularized by Elon Musk back in 2012.
Hyperloop One was co-founded by Brogan BamBrogan, a former SpaceX engineer credited with developing the original heat shields for the Dragon capsule. One of its early employees was Josh Giegel (now serving as the current chief technology officer), also a former SpaceX engineer.
Since its founding in 2015, Hyperloop One has raised a whopping $368.4 million, according to CrunchBase. Now backed by DPWorld and Virgin, the company is still trying to get its vision of a high-speed, zero-emission transportation system off the ground, with feasibility studies underway in India, Dubai and several locations around the United States.
BamBrogan actually founded another company that would build off the hyperloop concept after being ousted from Hyperloop in a power struggle in 2016. His now-defunct startup Arrivo was attempting to merge aspects of the hyperloop with another Muskian idea, the Boring Co.
Arrivo arrives as a new Hyperloop venture from a Hyperloop One co-founder
Beyond the big swings taken by Relativity, Hyperloop and Arrivo are other very early-stage companies just starting to emerge from stealth.
One is First Resonance, a software development platform that leverages the skills its co-founder and CTO Karan Talati developed over a three-year stint at SpaceX. The company focuses on industrial process automation, management and tracking for big manufacturers in areas like space, aerospace and automotive manufacturing — natural extensions of Talati’s work with SpaceX.
Finally, there’re companies like the still-stealthy startup founded by Benson Tsai, a former SpaceX battery expert who is now reportedly working on the next generation of pizza delivery robots, and Freeform Future, which is making the next generation of metal 3D printers.
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