00:00Let's start with what is a big backing of your company, a big round.
00:03Iconic is in there, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Capital G, Altimeter.
00:08The list is long, but those are our top tier investors.
00:12What is it that they think they see in K2?
00:15Yeah, space is becoming an infrastructure play, right?
00:18And you're seeing applications like communications and compute going from the ground and the air to space.
00:24And so we started K2 to go build the highest power, most capable satellites that have ever been launched.
00:30And I think these investors saw that what we had built was something super different, really differentiated, massive moats from
00:36a technical perspective and a really solid book of revenue to build off of.
00:40And so, yeah, we're really excited to announce this round.
00:41It's a big round for us and we're excited to bring a bunch of those names onto our cap table.
00:46So K2 can do quite a lot with $500 million because the whole point of the design you have is
00:52that you can produce very fast at low cost, low cost being $15 million per satellite.
00:58Is that kind of the play here to get funding to move quick?
01:02Exactly.
01:03Yeah, the capability that we're delivering historically was done by a billion dollar satellite made by one of the primes.
01:09It cost, you know, a billion dollars and took seven to 10 years to produce.
01:12Like our whole play was how do we figure out how to take on all of these hard engineering challenges,
01:18giant solar rays, giant batteries, giant reaction wheels, figure out how to do that in an industrial way, turn it
01:24from something that used to be a science project to something that's mass producible.
01:27And if we could do that, we could reset how we roll out infrastructure layers in space.
01:34If you're the domain expert in very big satellites with high power requirement, does SpaceX or someone else give you
01:43a call, Karan, and say, look at our design for Orbital Data Center, help us?
01:51You know, I think that people saw the 20 kilowatt satellite that's now flying on orbit today, and they're starting
01:57to hear about our plans for what we call the 100 kilowatt class satellite.
02:00It's actually a bit more than 100 kilowatts, but we'll save that for another day.
02:03But it's one of the largest, highest power satellites that has ever existed, and it's what makes Orbital Data Centers
02:08possible.
02:10So while it's not SpaceX, almost everybody else has been reaching out to us asking to work with us on
02:15that capability because, you know, going high power allows you to put up a lot of compute.
02:21Being able to put a lot of compute on orbit fundamentally changes the economics, the scalability of compute, especially at
02:26a time where we're, you know, pretty constrained from a supply perspective on compute.
02:31And so we're excited to be in the middle of that.
02:33We're going to be working with a number of different players as we roll out that differentiated capability.
02:38It's been nearly four months since you deployed your first satellite.
02:42What has the learnings been in that time?
02:44Yeah, I think at this point, you know, we're like 120 days in, and it's been amazing.
02:49Like, we've learned a ton.
02:50The entire tech stack was all brand new, right?
02:52About 85% of the satellite was built in-house.
02:55We had to design it because these subsystems didn't exist with this capability.
03:00And so this was a major de-risking moment for the company.
03:03We've collected a tremendous amount of data on the performance of the platform.
03:07Across different thermal situations, across different power situations with a bunch of different payloads.
03:12All of that has now been fed back into what we call our Block 2 design, which is going to
03:16be rolling out next year and launching across two different launches next year as we scale the company.
03:23You know, you have some contractual obligations to the government around Golden Dome, for example.
03:29What's the pressure of that to meet deadlines, to be able to pull it off?
03:35Yeah, at this point, we've sold about a billion dollars in contracts, right?
03:38We crossed the billion-dollar mark a few months ago, and a lot of it was on the back of
03:41this successful first mission.
03:42We have a number of national security customers that are incredibly excited about this capability and what it could do
03:48for future infrastructure and architecture plays that they're thinking about, right?
03:52And so, you know, hitting schedule is incredibly important.
03:55We did that with this first mission.
03:56We've now got a tremendous amount of demand.
03:58A lot of what we're using the fundraising for is to go make sure that we can de-risk the
04:04supply chain, de-risk the subsystems mass production, increase the footprint, and make sure that we're continuing to execute to
04:12satisfy the massive demand that we're seeing.
04:15Karam, real quick, your launch provider, and what does launch capacity look like for you guys going forward?
04:20Yeah, so the first satellite, the 20-kilowatt satellite, is made for any 5-meter-faring class launch vehicle.
04:26To date, we've launched on Falcon 9, and we'll continue to launch on a number of other launches with SpaceX
04:31in the future.
04:32Beyond that, you know, we'll use other players that are building 5-meter-faring class launch vehicles.
04:36And in the future, the 100-kilowatt class satellite is designed for, you know, much larger, super-heavy launch vehicles
04:42like New Glenn and Starship.
04:44So we're pretty excited about the new launch vehicles that are coming online.
04:48We're excited about what SpaceX is doing.
04:50And we just want to be able to take advantage of the launch options that are going to be out
04:53there over the next 10 years.
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