Muon Series C: Reflections on the Journey and What Lies Ahead

Just over five years ago, in the early depths of COVID, I was lucky enough to meet Jonny Dyer and his cofounders Paul Day, Dan McCleese, Pascal Stang, and Reuben Rohrschneider. They came with a pitch informed by their 70+ years working in the space industry that addressed my own lived frustrations investing in New Space. For all the progress made in unlocking satellite launch, deploying satellite constellations at scale was still too damn difficult. At the end of our first meeting I wrote a note to my team ”This is probably the most impressive technical founding team I’ve ever met.” I ended up writing the biggest check at formation stage that I’d ever written.

Today we’re thrilled to announce Muon’s $250M Series C led by Eclipse Ventures. Working with Jonny and the incredible Muon team over the last five years has been a true privilege, and I wanted to write a short post to reflect on the journey here and what lies ahead.

Owning the end-to-end mission

The founding thesis Jonny and team pitched me was deceptively simple on the surface, but mired in operational complexity under the hood. While the New Space industry had gotten a lot of things right–the value of proliferated LEO satellite constellations, unlocking cheap launch, leveraging faster refresh cycles and more commoditized hardware–the brutal reality was that most satellite constellations failed to deliver on their promise.  It was still too hard and too expensive to deploy satellite constellations at scale. The industry needed a modern, software-enabled space prime contractor that could deliver complex satellite missions end-to-end. Selling a bus wasn’t enough: you needed to get involved with the customer from day one in mission formulation, leverage software and reusable hardware across mission design and deployment, operate the constellation post-deployment, and ultimately own the outcomes for the customer.

Platform first, designed to scale

The demand for such a service was immediately obvious to me as someone who had felt the pain of trying to work with legacy space primes through other companies in our national security portfolio. But the challenge was just as clear: space is really, really hard, and signing up to own end-to-end missions for demanding commercial and government customers would be extraordinarily hard work. And so you needed a team that was simply extraordinary. The Muon team had the scar tissue and expertise in spades to pull it off, and designed Muon from day one to scale to this challenge. Every design decision the team made from the beginning was platform-first, with an eye towards making their 10th satellite mission a fraction of the cost and complexity of their first. They invested in their own in-house simulator, MuSim, before they had a single satellite in orbit. They built best-in-class payload IP in house (like the best infrared sensor in the industry) and reused them across missions. They started with shared avionics they can leverage across satellite classes instead of custom-engineering each one. A lot of times, this meant taking the harder path that could scale rather than the shortcut to making a customer happy.

Five years later, we see the industry rapidly moving towards the Muon model. But our belief is that you simply cannot retrofit reusability into an architecture that was never designed for it. Muon made the harder choices from day one and is accruing the benefits at scale.

Team > strategy

Muon had the right insight and strategy, but the most differentiated thing about the company is the team. Space is an industry with an extraordinary amount of noise in it right now.  Announcements outrun capabilities (and sometimes the laws of physics), missions quietly fail to deliver, valuations far outrun revenue and delivery, and many teams are better at selling the story than delivering on the promises they’ve made.

Jonny and the team at Muon are the opposite of that. They’ve delivered a 100% mission success rate with eleven satellites on orbit. They’re working with an extraordinary set of customers on an incredible set of missions, including a real-time wildfire detection constellation with Google and an RF data and analytics constellation with Sierra Nevada Corporation. They have beat their plan every year for the five years working with them–including multiple times when we raised the plan midway through the year.

Part of that is because they've done this before. Four of the five founders built Skybox, the first VC-backed commercial satellite company, sold to Google for $500M in 2014, including Jonny, who was Skybox's Chief Engineer and, before that, one of the earliest engineers at SpaceX.

But perhaps most importantly, they’ve built a mission-driven culture with an extraordinary bar that keeps being raised for both talent and integrity. The energy in the Muon office is something else, and if you’re interested in space at all, I’d encourage you to pay them a visit.

The opportunity ahead

The tailwinds behind Muon are about as strong as I've seen in any sector. The U.S. and its allies are replacing forty-year-old satellite infrastructure on a timeline that traditional primes cannot meet. We believe every commercial technology company will need a strategy to leverage space data and space infrastructure in the decade ahead.

The pattern in their own customer base tells the story better than I can. Small pathfinder missions that de-risk the technology are rapidly turning into hundred-million-dollar constellations with recurring operations revenue behind them.

This round funds an aggressive production ramp to meet the extraordinary demand Muon sees. It is one of the most ambitious plans I’ve seen a company put forward, and I believe Muon is one of the few teams in the world equipped to execute on it. Because they have been building towards this moment from the first pitch. A hearty congratulations to the entire team at Muon!