Apex Wants To Bring Henry Ford-Style Mass Production To Satellites

Forbes

a day ago

At Apex Technology's new, brightly lit factory in Los Angeles, a monitor shows the vital signs and location of its first satellite as it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes.
The stresses it's undergoing as it passes from blazing sunlight to the cold of night illustrate why making satellites is so hard – and expensive, said Apex's CEO and cofounder, Ian Cinnamon. 'Imagine your phone has to stay on for five years, and every 45 minutes you're going to put it in the oven and then the freezer,' said the fast-talking 33-year-old, with a toothy grin.
The satellite, named Aries after Cinnamon's dog, a brown and white Havanese, was launched last year less than 12 months after Apex started work on it, in what they claim is a record time for a small satellite designed to be mass produced. It's a first step toward their goal of bringing Henry Ford-style mass production to the satellite industry.
Past the monitor, in a clean room on the other side of a clear vinyl curtain, hairnet-wearing technicians work on another Aries satellite, which sits on a wheeled dolly at one of six stations on Apex's assembly line.
Cinnamon says it's the wave of the future in the satellite industry, where factories have historically built a single spacecraft at a time. With cofounder and CTO Max Benassi, a former lead engineer at SpaceX, he plans to produce a dozen satellites a month at the factory.
Satellite manufacturing has long been a bespoke business, with each spacecraft customized for their mission, like taking pictures of the Earth or beaming down TV signals. Elevated costs and delays have come with the territory.
With more and more small satellites being launched into low-Earth orbit, Apex is trying to convince constellation developers that it would be faster and more affordable to use a standardized spacecraft instead. Apex is offering three different types of "buses," meaning the main body of the satellite, including power and control systems — customers just have to add their own sensors and other payloads. Like, say, weapons to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, as envisioned for President Trump's Golden Dome.
Similar to automakers, Apex offers different trim levels of its satellites, with options like more power, a fancier communications system and a choice between electrical or chemical propulsion. Otherwise Apex isn't changing a thing.
'You either take it or you leave it,' Cinnamon said.
He thinks that reducing the complexity will be a winning formula for buyers of small satellites, like defense contractors and telecom companies. Cinnamon and Benassi see a lot of runway: Before they started Apex in 2022, the duo canvassed such buyers and said they heard universal dissatisfaction over delays, cost creep and poor quality. 'We want to be the first satellite bus manufacturer that people do not hate. That's our differentiator,' Cinnamon told Forbes .
Apex's basic premise makes sense, said Caleb Henry, director of research at the space consultancy Quilty Analytics: Satellite operators have long recognized that buying standardized spacecraft would be advantageous. But the urge to seek more expensive custom solutions is powerful. 'They become their own worst enemy,' Henry said.
Apex's executive team reviews blueprints of their first factory. From left, mission services chief Nirav Mehta, sales lead Andrew Berg, CEO Ian Cinnamon, CTO Max Benassi and manufacturing head Alex Verrelli. Ethan Pines for Forbes
Satellite manufacturers booked $20 billion in revenue worldwide last year, according to the Satellite Industry Association. Apex hopes to contend for a big share of a growing pie as the U.S. military expands in space. Golden Dome alone could cost more than $800 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Apex has a long way to go: the company only produced three satellites in 2024. It's aiming for 10 this year.
Still, strong sales boosted its revenue last year to $60 million, Forbes estimates, mostly from predelivery payments for its Aries bus, which can carry up to 330 pounds of payload, and Nova, named after Benassi's bernadoodle, which can hold twice as much. (A third bus is in the works that can carry 1,000 pounds, called Comet, after a dog that an early employee flirted with adopting.) Cinnamon says that orders have topped $100 million from roughly a dozen customers, with defense accounting for about two-thirds. Apex is close-mouthed about who they are and what it's doing for them, citing government restrictions, but they include the British aerospace conglomerate BAE and defense tech startup Anduril, which has ordered at least one satellite as it seeks to expand into space.
One commercial customer is Aetherflux, which plans to build a network of satellites in space to harvest solar power. Apex is set to deliver the bus for their first demo satellite Friday. Aetherflux's founder, the billionaire Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt, was impressed enough by Apex to become an investor as well, praising Benassi's technical chops and Cinnamon's drive in an interview with Forbes . 'Those guys are hardworking, they're scrappy,' he said.
Cinnamon says demand is so strong that they're exploring ways to accelerate their production ramp, which currently is slated to reach a rate of 144 satellites a year in 2028.
The company raised $200 million in April to build out the ability to produce more of its own parts, increasing its total funding to $322 million in equity and debt. Backers include 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 Ventures and XYZ Capital. The company's rapid progress has gained it a spot on this year's Next Billion-Dollar Startups list of 25 venture-backed companies Forbes thinks are most likely to reach a $1 billion valuation.
Commercial activity in low-Earth orbit has exploded in recent years, but Apex may have muted prospects in the biggest market: telecommunications. The two companies building the largest constellations to provide broadband internet from space, SpaceX and Amazon, are making their own spacecraft in-house.
Defense is its biggest opportunity. The Defense Department is keen to expand its satellite supplier base, and Apex's performance has been impressive so far, a Space Force officer told Forbes on the condition of anonymity since he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. 'The DOD is tired of spending a ton of money to either not get a capability delivered on time or to their expectations.'
Apex has successfully worked through a series of the sort of small R&D contracts that the Pentagon uses to test out new companies, and in February it won a $46 million contract from the Space Force for an unspecified number of Aries satellites. (York Space Systems has filed a lawsuit alleging it was awarded without a proper competition.)
Sitting at a desk in his office in front of a painting of his dog Aries in a space suit, Cinnamon said he's already convinced a couple of companies that have produced their own buses to try out Apex – and he's gunning for more. 'My dream would be every single major prime that's competing in Golden Dome [uses] the Apex satellite bus platforms.'
The company's aim to dominate the satellite industry is underlined in its conference rooms, all named after apex predators: caiman, orca, hawk. The sign outside Cinnamon's office bears the name of the deadliest predator of all — human. Dangerous Mind
Cinnamon grew up in Los Angeles, a son of sitcom writers. He showed a precocious ability for programming – and commerce. He sold video games online in elementary school and wrote a textbook for teens called Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius at age 15. (He later wrote another book in the Evil Genius series, on building drones.) Cinnamon fell in love with space, too, starting rocketry clubs at his middle and high school. He went to MIT to study aerospace engineering, but shifted tracks after deciding the program was a conveyor belt to a straitjacketed job at a giant defense contractor or with the government. 'I'd be fired within a few hours,' he laughs. 'Bureaucracy and I are not going to get along.'
Technicians work on Aries satellite buses on Apex's assembly line. Courtesy of Apex Technology
After earning a degree in brain science, he went to work for billionaire Mark Pincus at a startup incubator. On the side, Cinnamon cofounded a nonprofit that tried to use machine learning to make an HIV vaccine, an effort that won him a place in the 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30.
In 2016, Cinnamon started a company called Synapse that developed an AI system to automatically detect weapons in the images captured by scanners at airport security checkpoints. The company struggled to clinch many customers, but he sold it in 2020 to Palantir, where he worked with satellite companies to apply his technology to classifying what was in the images they were capturing on Earth — and came to believe there was room for a better spacecraft maker.
In the previous decade, the market began to shift from large, billion-dollar satellites in geosynchronous orbits to constellations of dozens to hundreds of smaller ones closer to Earth. Some companies had decided to build their own small satellites, like Earth observation pioneers Planet and Spire, and of course SpaceX. A flock of new startups had come on the scene to build smallsats for others, including the military, like Terran Orbital and York Space Systems.
Cinnamon's customers at Palantir, and others he spoke to, weren't satisfied with them, he said. 'There was no satellite manufacturer who was able to keep up with that demand.' Apex's competitors, like the European aerospace giant Airbus and Terran, which was acquired in 2024 by Lockheed Martin, say they offer standardized platforms that they can produce at volume; Cinnamon argues that in reality their satellite models are just a starting point for customization.
Fixing the product allows for faster manufacturing and more rapid delivery – as well as firm pricing, which Apex, in an industry first, is making public on its website, with a menu to run through the various options.
The base version of Aries starts at $3.5 million and can be delivered in six months, the company says; fully loaded, the LEO version is $9.5 million and takes 12 months. Nova starts at $6 million.
That's likely more than the cost to SpaceX of its narrowly tailored Starlink satellites, which the consultancy Quilty estimates have run up to a million apiece. But it's less than the prices the U.S. military's Space Development Agency has paid for the constellation it's building, ranging from an average of $15 million for communications satellites to $40 million to $45 million for missile tracking spacecraft.
Apex has also designed its satellites to be easier to put together, allowing the startup to widen its hiring to lower-paid mechanics with auto experience.
It aims to increase the share of components custom built in-house or by contractors to 90% from 50% now, on the conviction that suppliers won't be able to support its production expansion.
Apex investor and board member Ross Fubini, founder of the venture capital firm XYZ, who previously backed Cinnamon at Synapse, said he's been impressed by the young entrepreneur's deft triangulation of a complicated market.
'A lot of the tension in this part of the business is you have to not do everything your customer wants,' he said.
In the case of Golden Dome, the customer has yet to even define what it wants. But a host of other companies hungry for the opportunity have acquired startups making small satellites to stay relevant as the market for larger ones stagnated, including Lockheed (Terran), Raytheon (Blue Canyon) and Boeing (Millennium Systems). SpaceX, which has built over 9,000 satellites for its Starlink network, also could be a compelling option for the government – though seemingly less so following founder Elon Musk's falling out with Trump.
Apex could be at a disadvantage unless it strikes a strong partnership with a prime contractor, said Micah Walter-Range, an industry consultant and former director of research at the Space Foundation. And Apex's drive to bring its supply chain in house to boost production brings a host of additional risks.
'It's possible to do all the things that they say they're going to do, but it comes down to the execution.' More from Forbes Forbes Starlink's Numbers Could Bring SpaceX's Valuation Crashing Down By Jeremy Bogaisky Forbes This Billionaire Immigrant Is Racing Elon Musk To Connect Your Phone From Space By Alex Knapp Forbes Robinhood's Billionaire Cofounder Wants To Set Up Hundreds Of Solar Panels In Space By Alex Knapp