My background before this work was as a short seller. That shapes everything about how I approach a company pitch. Engineers study risk to a system — stress points, failure modes, structural dependencies. A business is a system. Short sellers apply that same discipline: deep qualitative and quantitative fundamental analysis to identify where the risk actually lives. Not what management says, but what the numbers and the structure reveal. That's now my passion on the other side of the trade — helping these companies identify those risks early, mitigate them, and scale.
The U.S. doesn't have a space capability problem. It has a capital-translation and integration problem. According to BryceTech's Start-Up Space 2026 report, $73.8 billion was invested in commercial space startups between 2016 and 2025. The technology is real. The companies are building. The friction is that the acquisition system was designed for a world where government was the only buyer — and the VC ecosystem funding these companies runs on an entirely different clock. That 18-to-36-month gap between how fast commercial moves and how fast acquisition moves is where national security risk quietly piles up. Closing that gap is the job.
Companies find us through proactive research, investor referrals, and direct outreach. We're looking for non-traditional companies at TRL 5 and above — far enough along that the technology is real, early enough that there's still time to shape how it comes into the architecture. Once we've got a company worth digging into, we run them through four due diligence lenses: Capability Readiness Level, Operational Utility Assessment, Supply and Cyber Chain Security Level, and Financial Confidence Level. The first three the acquisition community knows. The fourth — the FCL — is where most program offices don't have a process, and where we spend most of our time. Companies that clear it, we get them ready for SpaceWERX TACFI and STRATFI.
Here's the challenge with private companies: they file nothing publicly. No 10-K, no earnings call, no analyst coverage. You get what they decide to give you — a polished pitch deck and a data room they've curated. We read both as sales documents, because that's what they are. What we're actually looking for is what didn't make it in.
The five sources we always run
SAM.gov and USASpending.gov show what the government has actually paid them — a reality check against their claimed DoD revenue. Crunchbase and Pitchbook show who owns the company, when they invested, and at what valuation. We're looking at investor quality, ownership concentration, and any foreign exposure that creates CFIUS risk. LinkedIn employee trends tell us if the company is actually growing or quietly shrinking. Reference checks — former employees, customers, suppliers — are where the most useful intelligence usually lives. The question we always ask is "why did you leave?" We look at the pitch deck and data room last, after we've already formed a view from the other four.
The FCL criteria that actually predict success aren't the ones companies lead with. Team experience matters — not pedigree, but whether anyone on the leadership team has actually scaled a hard tech business before. Investor quality matters more than how much they've raised: majority American-owned, Tier 1 or 2 VCs, nothing in the cap table that creates problems at transition. The most consistent predictor is capital management and milestone execution — a company that has hit its milestones with the money it raised tells you something real about how that team performs under pressure. And IP ownership is non-negotiable: core IP has to be company-owned, not licensed, not exposed to government march-in rights from prior SBIR awards.
The question we keep coming back to on defense alignment is straightforward: is government a pull customer or a fallback? A company that only shows up at the DoD door when commercial sales slow, or whose whole model runs through SBIR dependency, is not one we can build the architecture around. The companies that have come through our process and gotten to STRATFI are the ones where government was a strategic customer from day one — and the outcomes track. Impulse Space, K2 Space, and Apex Space are at or near unicorn valuation. Starfish Space, Muon Space, Varda, and Turion are on that path. Not because the technology was obviously right. Because the fundamentals — team, capital discipline, IP ownership, customer mix — held up when we looked hard at them.
And when a company earns a high rating through our process, the work doesn't stop there. Those of us doing this work — across the space community — open introductions to investors. We take diligence calls — sometimes multiple rounds — where VCs and LPs can ask us directly about operational utility, integration pathway, and how we see the program developing. We sit with founders through TACFI and STRATFI applications, help them translate their technology roadmap into acquisition language, and flag the landmines before they hit them. The USSF acquisition process is hard from the outside. Our job is to walk alongside the companies that have earned that — not hand them a map and step back.