Ian Cinnamon didn’t set out to build a satellite company. After selling his first startup to Palantir, he became convinced the real bottleneck in space wasn’t launch or payloads, but the spacecraft itself. While rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, satellite buses were still being built like bespoke engineering projects. Apex’s answer was simple in theory and incredibly difficult in practice: turn spacecraft into products.
Four years later, Apex is building standardized satellite platforms for commercial and national security customers, with a product lineup that now spans missions from LEO to GEO. We get into whether the satellite bus market is genuinely supply constrained, if standardized spacecraft become commodities or durable technology platforms, and how Starship, proliferated constellations, and rising defense demand are reshaping the economics of spacecraft manufacturing.
We also cover:
- Why Ian believes spacecraft should become products instead of bespoke engineering programs
- Whether the satellite bus market is actually underbuilt or heading toward oversupply
- How Apex thinks about manufacturing, vertical integration, and scaling production
- Why larger satellites may make more sense in a world of cheap launch
- The capital strategy behind building one of the industry’s fastest-growing companies
Check out Valley of Depth #045 on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
• Chapters •
00:00 – Trailer
00:55 – New CEO of Apex
02:29 – The Apex origin story
05:39 – Partnering with Max Benassi
07:13 – Successes and drawbacks of Apex's first 6 months
08:50 – Apex's current product set
10:36 – Misconceptions about how much mass you need in orbit
12:08 – Is the plan to build larger and larger satellites indefinitely?
13:11 – State of the bus market today
14:52 – Domestically oversupplied, globally undersupplied
16:31 – Apex's biggest opportunities on the commercial and national security side
18:50 – When should a company utilize Apex vs. building their own bus in-house?
19:46 – Apex's moat
21:12 – Juggling the bespoke government customer
22:15 – What the primes having in-house buses says about the market
23:07 – Commoditization of the bus vs. owning the complete mission
26:01 – Apex partnerships
27:27 – How many satellites are you building at a $100B company?
28:10 – Apex's three $200M fundraising rounds
32:05 – Is there another fundraising round incoming?
33:04 – Where Apex needs to be to seriously consider going public
34:58 – The road to 200 satellites per year
35:46 – Who is Apex losing deals to the most?
37:39 – Apex vs. K2
40:27 – How the push for heavy launch will affect Apex
42:15 – Apex's ability to get to space if SpaceX fully cuts commercial launches
44:35 – Is York an under or overvalued business?
46:36 – What keeps Ian up at night?
50:10 – When is Apex launching their own constellation?
51:06 – The missions that Apex could enable
52:30 – Is Ian still excited about asteroid mining?
• Show notes •
Apex’s’ website — https://www.apexspace.com/
Ian’s’ socials — https://x.com/IanCinnamon
Mo's socials — https://x.com/itsmoislam
Payload’s socials — https://x.com/payloadspace / https://www.linkedin.com/company/payloadspace
Ignition’s socials — https://x.com/ignitionnuclear /
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ignition-nuclear/
Tectonic’s socials — https://x.com/tectonicdefense / https://www.linkedin.com/company/tectonicdefense/
Valley of Depth archive — Listen: https://pod.payloadspace.com/
• About us •
Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter — and the people building them.
Brought to you by Arkaea Media, the team behind Payload (space), Ignition (nuclear energy), Decoding Bio (biotech) and Tectonic (defense tech), this show goes beyond headlines and hype. We talk to founders, investors, government officials, and military leaders shaping the future of national security and deep tech. From breakthrough science to strategic policy, we dive into the high-stakes decisions behind the world’s hardest technologies.
