Kingscrowd's Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau and Teddy Lyons join Brian Belley to review bluShift Aerospace: a hybrid rocket company that pivoted from green space launch to defense boosters, its $4.4M Specter contract, and how deep tech gets funded.
Kingscrowd senior investment associates Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau and Teddy Lyons join host Brian Belley to break down bluShift Aerospace, a Maine rocket company that spent a decade building a cleaner hybrid rocket booster and has now pivoted to one of defense's most urgent shortages.
bluShift was founded in 2014 by Sascha Deri to launch small satellites with a nontoxic, biofuel-powered hybrid engine. When an advisor pointed to the shortage of solid rocket motors for defense testing, the company turned its existing technology toward that market. Its booster sells for about $1.1 million, compared with $4 to $5 million for a traditional solid booster, and it is easier to store and transport. bluShift recently signed a contract with hypersonics startup Specter for four boosters, worth $4.4 million.
Brian, who comes from the aerospace industry, explains how solid, liquid and hybrid rocket motors differ and why decades of supplier consolidation left the US short on solid rocket motor capacity. Léa and Teddy then look at the bigger question for investors: how deep tech companies fund long development timelines without diluting founders and early backers out of the company.
In this episode:
● The pivot from green space launch to defense boosters
● Solid vs. liquid vs. hybrid rockets, explained with the model rockets you launched as a kid
● The $4.4 million Specter contract and why it changes the risk picture
● How Rejuvenate Bio and Pirouette Pharma use partners to pay for development
● The non-dilutive capital playbook: grants, government contracts, paid pilots, joint ventures and licensing
● Unit economics: a $750K build cost today and a $250K target at scale
● Why Kingscrowd likes investing in the "valley of death"
● What Brian took away from meeting founder Sascha Deri
Host: Brian Belley, Kingscrowd
With: Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau and Teddy Lyons, Senior Investment Associates, Kingscrowd
bluShift Aerospace is raising on Wefunder, open to accredited and non-accredited investors. Kingscrowd's full analysis, including competition, market and team, is available to Kingscrowd Edge members at kingscrowd.com.
Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.
[00:00:12] Brian Belley:
Welcome back, everyone to another Kingscrowd podcast. I'm your host, Brian Belley from Kingscrowd. We are joined by our two senior investment associates. These are the individuals that look at hundreds of deals every couple of months at Kingscrowd, and do the analysis and bring them to you. We have got Léa and Teddy Lyons, welcome to both of you. Today we're going to be diving into a deal that is very interesting. That's on our radar that we're taking a look at. And this is one that's a little bit near and dear to my heart with a aerospace background. And that is bluShift Aerospace. So bluShift Aerospace is a company that's essentially developing a hybrid rocket propulsion for defense and space applications.
[00:00:51]
Now there's a little bit of a environmental aspect to this product as well where it actually started. And they will be telling us a little bit more about that, but around saying, how can we make something that's less toxic, right. A lot of the propellants and typical solid rocket boosters and other things not very good for the environment. So bluShift was actually founded a while ago for a company, right, in terms of 2014. So we're going back nearly 12 years. And they had the original goal of building that kind of cleaner way to be able to launch small satellites into space over time, as we're going to hear today. And we'll be getting into there's been a little bit of a pivot in their business model where they're now looking more at the immediate opportunity around kind of helping to serve this shortage of rocket motor capabilities in the US defense market.
[00:01:36]
So we'll be talking about the technology today. We'll be getting into what a hybrid rocket is. We're going to be talking about a little bit of their financing strategy and a lot of other great things. In addition, something that they've recently announced bluShift has gotten award. So we're going to be diving into some of the details and the finances around there.
[00:01:55]
So there's a lot to talk about here. There's a lot to like here. There's a lot to dig into. We'll be talking about the founder. With that, I'm going to hand things over to Léa who led our investment analysis on bluShift. So, Léa, why don't you give us a little bit of background and kick off the discussion?
[00:02:10] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
Thank you. Brian. Yes. Today we're going to be talking about how to finance deep tech startups. And we're going to be talking about a pivot story. So let's have the pivot story already. As you mentioned, bluShift Aerospace was founded in 2014 by Sascha Deri and the background of Sascha. He spent his career in the green energy space. What that means is that, the he came into bluShift with that kind of climatic how to make things green, how to make things better for the environment type of mindset. And he wanted his original goal was to build a rocket booster that would be nontoxic and will emit less greenhouse gas emissions. So he started by developing a hybrid model that is using biofuel.
[00:02:56]
And to me, that's where kind of the reduction in carbon emission come from because you are using a renewable source. So the carbon is absorbed by the plant, kind of turns it to a biofuel. Not perfect then better, than alternative traditional solutions. And Brian, you'll tell us more about that later. And so that they kind of made it. They, they've been doing some testing. The product is working. But like a lot of companies, when you spend ten, 12 years developing a product, it costs a lot of money. And this is not the end of the journey here. If they really want to be able to use the booster to launch rockets, they still have many, many years of development testing to come before actually launching into the space industry.
[00:03:39]
So what happened is that one of the advisors who also is in their space industry, told them that there actually is a shortage of solid rocket motors in the defense industry, meaning to launch, for example, hypersonic missiles. And that advisor advised them to pivot. One thing I like about the founder is that he actually took his time to think about it and make sure it would be a good fit, but they actually decided that for the next couple of years, they're going to be focusing on the defense industry.
[00:04:12]
That gives them a faster access to market and revenue, because the product as it is now, can actually be sold on that market. And there's a pressing need, so it's going to be a little bit less complicated for them to enter that market and actually get customers. So I think that going from the nobody stopping the space industry research and product development, that just spinning off a product and moving a little bit in the defense industry while in the background.
[00:04:43]
Still working on space on space models and maybe for people that are listening to us, Brian, you're an expert on that. Can you explain to us a little bit what is a hybrid model? How does that differentiate from solid models? Why there shortage of solid models and why of that matters?
[00:04:59] Brian Belley:
Absolutely. So what I'm actually going to do is pull up a great figure that you put in our analyst report. So this is something that Edge members on our website get access to. And it shows a little bit of the difference between a hybrid booster, a traditional solid rocket motor and a liquid rocket engine competitor. So think of it this way. If you were ever a kid, right, I think a lot of us probably played with these Estes rockets. They're basically little model rockets, maybe a foot or two feet tall. They come with these little solid rocket motors that essentially have this solid propellant grain, which is the fuel in the oxidizer mixed together. Essentially what happens is you have an igniter.
[00:05:36]
So you would push the little igniter in there. And when you launch it, it's all or nothing. There's basically no throttle control. There's no turning it off. Once you light that it burns through the whole motor. So for those rocket kits, it's very simple and able to do that. Now obviously SRB solid rocket boosters on things like Space Shuttle are much more complex than that.
[00:05:55]
But you can think of it in that way. So it's on or off. It's, you know, kind of dangerous. It's hard to store because if you ignite it, there is no off switch. Right? All of that oxidizer in the fuel is mixed together. Let's take a look at the liquid rockets. So basically what a liquid rocket is is it separates the oxidizer and the fuel into two separate tanks.
[00:06:16]
So it's a little bit more inherent safety there because the two can't combust unless you mix them together, but because they are in two separate tanks stored as liquids. You have a lot of these complexities. You're storing some of these at cryogenic temperatures, which means you need a lot of cooling. There's pumps, there's valves, there's a lot of complex parts.
[00:06:33]
And as you know, the more complexity, the more things that could potentially go wrong. Right now, some of the benefits of a liquid rocket engine are that you can throttle it so you can turn it on, you can turn it off. You can change the thrust. So there's more flexibility but a lot more complexity. And because that often a lot more cost. Let's take the hybrid booster now. So a hybrid is essentially a mix of two of those. You could think of it as kind of that solid core. But then it has a liquid oxidizer tank that's separate so that you still have the on and off switch by whether or not you're injecting that oxidizer into the propellant. But it has some more simplicity.
[00:07:12]
You don't have as many of these fuels and valves and moving parts that you need when you have two different liquid tanks. So the hybrid boosters, this is not a brand new technology. Hybrid rockets have been around or known about for decades, but some of the complexities around them are things like the combustibles, the stability, some of the efficiency.
[00:07:31]
So these are engineering challenges that I think companies like bluShift who are trying to build these, are now trying to overcome some of those challenges that we haven't been able to do before, and then bringing that together with this market need that we're seeing today. We're just we're solid rocket motor constrained, right. If you take a look at the market, what we've essentially done since, you know, the early 90s or even before is we've consolidated where we used to have all these different suppliers for solid rocket boosters, solid rocket motors.
[00:08:00]
We've kind of over time tried to simplify that. It's been more for low volume production. We've reduced suppliers where we went from, I think maybe 6 in 1995 to something like just 1 or 2 today. And one of those actually in the news last year, Northrop Grumman. You can Google this. It it blew up. They had one of their storage facilities essentially with that made some of these solid rocket motors, had a fire and exploded.
[00:08:26]
So you can see there's some of these dangers for storage for transportation. It's much harder. The hybrid booster gets around a lot of those complexities, but it isn't without, you know, some of those other complexities, the engineering challenges and other things that I mentioned. So hopefully that gives a good explanation. Léa.
[00:08:43] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
It does. And I think it's very important to mention why does that matter for customers? Because yes, Sascha kind of came into this company with wanted to make the boosters greener. But as often when a product becomes greener, there are a lot of adjacent benefits for customers. So in this case, it's a product that is way, way, way cheaper than solid boosters.
[00:09:05]
Solid booster cost 4 to $5 million per booster. bluShift Aerospace would be able to sell it around $1.1 million. I'm going to come back on that right now is also easier to transport because the liquid are not a dangerous way less regulations. It's way faster to manufacture and it's potentially reusable. So that all depends on what the user wants to do with it.
[00:09:29]
But it is, it is it could happen. And I think that cost really is what is launching bluShift's success right now. Know I love this talks. Because, they didn't go into that pivot blindly. They in early 2025, they had a company called Specter, which is a different startup that is focused on hypersonic missiles. So interest into bluShift's pivot and so interest into these boosters.
[00:09:59]
They need boosters for testing. They need to to test the missiles. However it's extremely expensive. Imagine 4 to $5 million per booster just for testing is a lot of money. So they just signed a couple of weeks ago contract with bluShift Aerospace, which is very exciting. For four boosters is priced at $1.1 million, meaning this is a $4.4 million contract for bluShift, which for an early stage startup that just pivoted is really the proof that just a year and a half after the official pivot, indeed, there is strong demand on that market, and that can help them generate revenue faster.
[00:10:35]
And that will de-risk, the capital risk of of that company maybe not completely de-risk it, but at least considerably lower the risk.
[00:10:45] Brian Belley:
And just to jump in real quick on that, like that's also something that changed since the launch of their campaign, since the start of their campaign. So when they started this investment opportunity, same terms, that Specter contract. Well, it had a high probability it was not signed. That was a recent update. So I think that's something even if you're an investor and you maybe took a look at this a couple of weeks or a month or two ago, that's new news that they actually won this contract now.
[00:11:08]
So that's pretty exciting.
[00:11:09] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
Yeah. What I like about the relationship with Specter as well is that it doesn't really end to the booster they're working on right now. They're so working on a smaller version developing it for Specter. So there is a possibility that Specter could normally buy one product from bluShift, two product. So this is a type of financing strategy for deep tech startups, which is spinning off a product trying to generate revenue.
[00:11:31]
While in the background they're working on their final product. And I know that in the biotech medtech, industrial is something that happens a lot because regulations really mean that sometimes it takes a very long time to bring product to market. So can you tell us maybe about example that you've seen on your side? And that can help investors understand what are the strategies to finance companies before putting their products on the market?
[00:11:54] Teddy Lyons:
Yeah, I think we often see in deep tech, but also, as you said in early stage pharma, that often companies have a bigger long term opportunity that will take many years and a lot of money to reach. But in the meantime, can they find a customer or partner that will actually pay them for the development journey of the product or a related product, as in bluShift's case, rather than asking, you know, shareholders continuing to dilute shareholders to fund every step of what could take tens of millions of dollars.
[00:12:27]
So we've seen a couple of these in equity crowdfunding that we've invested in. So Rejuvenate Bio had a bit of a similar strategy where the although the business is obviously very different than deep tech rockets, Rejuvenate. They're trying to essentially reverse aging in humans. That's their long term goal. That's going to take a lot of money, a lot of time to get through FDA trials.
[00:12:54]
But in the meantime, they are launching into the veterinary veterinary markets, and they have partnerships with Merck Animal Health and others that actually provide millions of dollars in milestone payments over the next two to 5 to 8 years as they develop their gene therapies for the veterinary markets. But once those drugs actually get to market in animals, they'll be generating a substantial amount of revenue from that that can actually help them help fund their clinical trials in humans.
[00:13:28]
So that's sort of a similar strategy where they're kind of approaching a different market in the kind of pursuit of the long term strategy, which is get this in humans and in bluShift's case, which is to get actually into orbit, that's the that's the long term goal. But in the meantime, finding a customer that will not only pay you to develop the product or a similar product for a specific use case, you know, you'll also make make revenue on that long term that can help fund your long term goal.
[00:14:00]
So Rejuvenate. Definitely a similar obviously much different industry but kind of a similar strategy. Another one we've seen is Pir- Pirouette Pharma. They are making the one push auto injectors for life saving drugs. And their initial strategy when we first invested was, you know, they have this patented device that is clearly better than the status quo. They're going to pair the device with, you know, a their own drug off the shelf and get, you know, get those through FDA clearance, as one product.
[00:14:34]
And then what they realized was a lot of these pharmaceutical companies are interested in pairing their drugs with Pirouette's device, because it actually allows them to submit for a patent protection for an additional ten years that they wouldn't otherwise get. So a lot of these drugs from these large pharmaceutical giants, they're only have exclusivity, patent exclusivity for ten years before it becomes generic.
[00:15:00]
And but if they pair it with Pirouette's device, they can actually submit for, for an extension on their, on their patent protection. So because of that, they are pursuing partnerships with these pharmaceutical companies that will fund the development and FDA approval process for this kind of co-branded co-developed auto injector with the the pharmaceutical companies drug inside. And those pharmaceutical companies will end up selling them and Pirouette will get royalties from that.
[00:15:37]
So got a big picture there. It's really Pirouette's partnering with large pharmaceutical companies to pair their injector with the pharmaceutical companies drugs. And that gives them access to to royalty payments and makes it so they don't have to go through an FDA approval process by themselves, which obviously increases the cost and increases the time required to get to revenue generation.
[00:16:02]
So those are two examples from from medtech, in early stage pharmaceuticals, I think that there are of course some downsides to this. Obviously, the upsides is you get money, you get, support for for these difficult and often complex processes. But you do have to work on the specs that the customer wants. You have to work on with their milestone timelines and pressures that they'll eventually have on you, and potentially make decisions that you know you wouldn't have made otherwise because you're under pressure from the company that's paying you to develop the product.
[00:16:42]
So there are like give and takes there. I think the benefits of outweigh the downsides. And it's as an investor, it's very, it's a very de-risking event to have one of these partnerships, co-development partnerships with large, you know, million dollar checks associated with them. So, yeah, so it was really cool to sort of see the, the parallels between two very different industries.
[00:17:09]
And Brian, I wanted to give it back to you on bringing it back to bluShift. And the US experienced a shortage of US solid rocket motors right now. And kind of some of the proof points that that is truly a problem today.
[00:17:27] Brian Belley:
Yeah, I think, you know, the the history here, as I was alluding to a little bit before, is that, again, as a country, we essentially spent 25 or 30 years consolidating our industrial base for supporting these types of rocket boosters. So it's low volume production. We consolidated suppliers, we close capacity, and we lost a lot of redundancy. And being someone who previously worked, you know, in the aerospace industry for the Department of Defense, you realize that your supply chains and not having all the risk concentrated in a few suppliers is critical because stuff happens, right? You need to have diverse supply chains so that if you have an issue with one supplier, if something happens that's kind of outside of your control, that you have other alternatives to be able to source some of those things from.
[00:18:15]
So here, you know, we're kind of now getting to this point where there's a lot of demand for these types of boosters, where maybe there wasn't in the past. We're seeing a lot more conflicts, right? In different parts of the world. A lot of these hypersonic test vehicles that are being launched and tested, all of these things use up the solid booster capacity that we have.
[00:18:35]
And it means that, as I mentioned, those 1 or 2 suppliers, if that that exists today, it concentrates that supply chain risk. So I think what we're seeing is that there is a real market need here. That bluShift as a company recognized okay. You know, we kind of started out as a company looking to do space launch now obviously kind of, you know, SpaceX being one of the big elephants in the room have really dramatically lowered the cost of that over, say, the last 10 or 15 years.
[00:19:02]
So they said, okay, we have this proprietary IP, we have this great engine. Where could we kind of pivot that might need it? And I think the defense, the defense application is a real situation for that. Just two case points that we're not just, you know, this isn't just a slide. That bluShift is saying, hey, there's this need. But in just in 2025, the DoD gave Anduril 14.3 million for basically Defense Production Act, in addition to a 75 million private investment that was specifically to expand solid rocket motor manufacturing and increase the number of domestic sources. So we know there's a real need there. Going back just a few years before in 2023, the DoD awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne $215 million specifically to modernize and expand the rocket propulsion production, including different production, to support some of the products.
[00:19:49]
So we're seeing this real need from the market, and I think this is where we have this use case of this company that has a the IP, the technology, the hybrid boosters that they're developing. In addition, with this market demand, where if they can find where they meet, you know, there's a real opportunity here. But yeah, yeah. And what are your thoughts on that?
[00:20:09] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
Yeah. I think that, you and Teddy just talked a lot about a lot of different financing solutions for at least a startup that are building their product. I kind of want to tie it back together. When you have a company that is at the product stage where bluShift used to be, and I'm not going to talk about crowdfunding and venture capital because these are kind of the obvious ones.
[00:20:31]
But I love seeing companies that are getting grants that are getting defense government contracts, like you just mentioned. Brian, I think this is a type of non-dilutive capital that is extremely important and say, why is it important to get non-dilutive capital versus dilutive capital? Because these deep tech startups, then it's tens of millions of dollars, if not more, before they can get their product.
[00:20:52]
You don't want the founder to be diluted too much. You don't want early investors to be diluted too much. So getting that, it doesn't mean that because you get grants or development contracts from the government that there is actually a demand for the product, but it means that there is some interest in the market that there is a use case. And one of the things that I love, it's kind of rare to get that, I've seen that happening with, with companies is a strategic corporate investment. So sometimes we have companies that are investing very early in a startup because they know that they will become customer later on. Now what? You get the pilot stage, you can get paid pilots, you can get customer prepayments.
[00:21:33]
Like this is happening with bluShift, where Specter is paying a little bit in advance, the company or you can get joint ventures. We've seen that with a company called EarthGrid, or the kind of helps to get money for developing the product, developing the pilot, kind of going to the final line. And then at the product stage, you have kind of what you mentioned, Teddy licensing.
[00:21:53]
I think it's a very smart way to generate revenue without having to already spend the capital on manufacturing on itself. You have sometimes the manufacturer that is going to help you finance, because they have a vested interest into usage, sitting and going to the manufacturing stage. You have a lot of venture debt and project finance, which is used a lot, especially in green tech, to kind of manufacture I'm thinking about it's very useful, like solar farm, wind farm, but sometimes just to manufacture hardware pieces that are extremely expensive, that cost couple of millions of dollars, but that can generate a lot of revenue.
[00:22:29]
And, a type of financing that I love saying is university based financing. So let's take the company that we've talked a lot about was actually developed in the university. What that means is I did not have to spend millions of dollars for developing this technology. The university is licensing the technology to acquire at a very affordable price. And that helps acquire only raise money to actually bring the product to market. All of these important to bring the product to market. Now, once your hardware company and you actually start building your product, you actually start manufacturing. The critical point is, can you actually lower your margins? Can you actually reach a point where the unit economic makes sense and you become profitable?
[00:23:15]
That is something you're seeing a lot.
[00:23:19] Teddy Lyons:
Yeah, yeah, I think with with a hardware deep tech company like this, there's two main kind of goals and milestones. It's okay. One, can you prove you can build an engine that works? Obviously bluShift has done that in the early stages. The other is longer term is is proving that you can repeatedly manufactured at a cost that supports an attractive business.
[00:23:44]
So as an investor, we obviously want to see definitely evidence of the first. And you know, begin to ask the questions around the second. So from what we've reviewed on bluShift, selling price is around one $1.1 million. In current build cost is 750,000. So that's 350 K in gross margin. And their target build cost at scale is 250 K, which would leave about 850 K in margin at the same selling price.
[00:24:13]
So obviously with technology that's complicated and this costly, that's a very different sort of picture in seven, seven, 850 K and gross margin and 350 K in gross margin. So that's really what we want to see the company moving to as the years go on here. And with a company like bluShift and Rockets and, you know, just complicated technology like this, there's a lot of variables at play here as you're thinking about the costs, manufacturing costs as they scale.
[00:24:46]
So longer term, are they buying components more cheaply at higher volumes? Does assembly take fewer amount of time as they increase their manufacturing capacity. Are they spreading equipment costs across more. And I think those are all questions among infinite others that as the company moves towards commercialization, that I'd want to see progress on as we continue to track this company again, it's probably too early to know the exact answers to these questions, or give reliable estimates on how the cost structure might change as they scale up.
[00:25:22]
Obviously, the economies of scale we all know in theory works. But yeah, it's just something we were we're going to be tracking for this company for sure. And the tricky part of it is you obviously have to spend a lot of money before you get the economies of scale saving. So you hire the people, buy equipment, build production capacity and anticipation of orders.
[00:25:46]
But, you know, if something happens, like orders arrive later than expected, you can end up with those higher operating expenses without the production volume that you needed to bring those costs down. So it's it's obviously a balancing act there when you're dealing with products that are this expensive in gradually ramping up the production, the manufacturing in tandem with the customer demand, so that you can eventually get those and benefit from those economies of scale, but you don't want to do it too early.
[00:26:18]
So, yeah, I think the, the manufacturing plan that bluShift has estimates that they need between like around 30 to $32 million in funding to reach a capacity of 400 to 500 engines annually, $1 million of engine. That's half $1 billion in revenue. So, yeah, I think it's obviously still very early to know the answers to these questions of manufacturing costs going down over time as they scale.
[00:26:48]
But it's something that we definitely want to continue to, to look at as this company progresses. Yeah.
[00:26:55] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
This is complicated for a lot of companies at the same stage. They're in what we call the Valley of death, which means there's a product that is ready. There's customers contract that assigned, but it takes capital to actually be able to start producing these orders. And at this stage, even the revenue that will come will naturally generate profit, because margins are just way too low.
[00:27:17]
And I remember being asked what stage does Kingscrowd Capital invest in and, I was like, well, you know, we're funding, what miners is that? You know, we're driving from when was in CF and Reg A. And then I kind of look at a portfolio and I realized that we have a lot of deals, not every single deal, but I think we have a pretty good deal in that valley of death.
[00:27:40]
Meaning companies have a product where the tech is pretty de-risked and have one contract, two contracts. And it kind of I feel like the dreamers type of investors are kind of gone because they intervene early, they invest early, they want to develop the product and the number oriented investors that want to see revenue generation and growth are not there yet.
[00:28:01]
And I feel like we put capital at that moment a lot. And honestly, that's something I'm proud of because I think that if a company has a product that is working, has not product market fit yet, but contract, I think that we're still getting in at reasonable valuations. We're taking the risk, but we're getting a reasonable valuation. And I think we can hopefully we'll see some significant, return from that.
[00:28:28] Teddy Lyons:
Yeah. And like I was saying, like when you're the Valley of Death I think is the stakes are really high on deep tech where hardware is so expensive, manufacturing is so expensive. You know, other companies that are less capital intensive, you know, if you're if if the costs become too much for manufacturing, you can do different types of pivots, the to save money and things like that.
[00:28:52]
With bluShift, it's like they need it's the stakes are really high and making sure that as they ramp up their capacity, do they have the customers for it? And just like making sure that balancing act is is pretty dialed in. But as from what I've heard from you to the, the founder seems really solid and amazing and kind of has a lot of these risks in mind as he's advancing this company towards commercialization.
[00:29:21]
But yeah, I just wanted to to throw a bat in there that with deep tech it's the risk is quite high. But I agree with you. These these are the types of stages that we love to invest at. Yes, the risks are high. The startup investing, the risks are high. That's how it is. And you got to just when you have high conviction bets, you want to put the money in at this sort of at this perhaps Valley of Death time that could, you know, could turn out negatively.
[00:29:44]
But if you have conviction, you want to is where you want to be.
[00:29:48] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
And Brian, you actually met the founder, right?
[00:29:51] Brian Belley:
Yeah. So I actually went to a Wefunder event a couple weeks back, and Sascha was one of the founders who was there. So I met him in person and, yeah, a couple couple takeaways. Right. And obviously when you're investing in early stage companies like we're talking about, there's so many challenges, there's so many things that can go wrong. So one of the things an investor will typically want to look for is like is this founder the type of person who will persevere, who will persist when things get tough and ugly? Because it's not a question of if, but it's a question of when. And I think Sascha is just a great example of that in a few different ways.
[00:30:26]
Right. So first off, he started this in 2014. This isn't just something that he started saying, hey, let's see if we can ride the space wave, right? He's been in this industry building. The fact that they have recently pivoted also shows he has some flexibility. Where right, as a founder, you want someone who is committed to the mission, but also not so blind that they keep trying to do the same thing, even when it might not work out in the end.
[00:30:49]
And I think that shows that, you know, Sascha through their pivot and just being able to listen to the advisors advice that he's coachable, that he's willing to try different things, willing to try different models, to be able to achieve their kind of end goal in mind. In addition, you know, I think one of the key things with a founder is their ability to communicate.
[00:31:08]
And when I met Sascha, so I had an aerospace background, but he was explaining bluShift and the rockets to someone else who was completely non-technical and just listening to him convey it in a way that was not getting into all the nitty gritty details of the technical aspects of how it works, but he was able to talk about the company, the potential, the problem that they're solving.
[00:31:29]
And I think that having a founder who can communicate like that to both technical and non-technical investors, which I think Sascha is a great example of, because, again, he he has an engineering degree, but he's not necessarily someone who spent 20 years, you know, leading rocket design at SpaceX or something else. He's a good blend of kind of that technical background, but he's also built a business.
[00:31:50]
You know, he successfully scaled a company like you probably know better than me. What was it like 29 million in revenue, I think. But he had another business prior to this. So, yeah, I mean, Sascha was just someone who was really approachable, really friendly, who explained things really well. And I think just as a founder, right, someone who, you know, is going to persevere, which obviously if he's been here for 12 years at this point, I don't think he's going anywhere anytime soon.
[00:32:13] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
It's time for my plug. If you want to meet Sascha, come to San Francisco on October 8th and he is going to be one of the three founders pitching. We have this startup showcasing, if you can go online right now, you can go on SF Tech Week calendar. So it's on October 8th at 5 p.m.. It's also on my LinkedIn. So very, very easy to find. But if you're in San Francisco, I hope to see you there.
[00:32:36] Brian Belley:
I highly recommend it again, like even just that night when I met a bunch of different founders in Boston. It's so much different meeting a founder in person, like hearing them, like just the passion that comes through. And it's very different than reading a web page where you don't get some of that personality. You can't understand. You know, how a person thinks and operates so highly, highly recommend you check that event out.
[00:32:58]
Léa is going to be at — I know it's going to be amazing. Great. Well, any other last things before we close out here? I think there's been a really good in-depth review. And of course all this analysis and a lot more is available on our website, not only for bluShift, but other companies. If you're interested of seeing, you know, how did bluShift actually rank in our rating algorithm? Did the fund actually invest?
[00:33:21]
You can become an Edge member today. You can head over to kingscrowd.com and sign up for that. But Léa, Teddy, any last words before we sign off?
[00:33:28] Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau:
I think that we've given just a surface overview of bluShift Aerospace to do so much more. In the report, we talk about competition. We talk about market. We dig more into the team and whether it's, well, the lines are definitely go check out the report and you will learn a lot, lot more about bluShift.
[00:33:48] Brian Belley:
Fantastic.
[00:33:49] Teddy Lyons:
Yeah I'm good. Great episode guys.
[00:33:51] Brian Belley:
Yeah. Well thank you everyone. We'll we'll sign off there again. We're going to be doing more deep dives like this in future podcast episodes where we'll be taking a look at different opportunities that are available to anyone to invest in. You don't have to be accredited. You don't have to be wealthy. Basically, anyone can go online and invest in these companies right now.
[00:34:07]
So we'll check out next time. Thank you everyone for joining us. And we'll see you back here in the next Kingscrowd podcast.