One of the things people find strange about Moonshot is our understanding of what space is, and what we consider to be a space startup. It surprises many people that it’s actually pretty broad, and some of our previous investments seem unintuitive until you grasp our perspective and what we’re trying to achieve at Moonshot.

Two of our most successful investments are non-traditional space startups. Swoop Aero is a logistics startup, who design and manufacture their own long-distance drones to deliver medical supplies to locations that were difficult, impossible or expensive to access before. They have revolutionised the way that vaccines are supplied in nations such as Vanuatu and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and have just announced their expansion into general drone delivery services across the UK.

So why would Moonshot make an investment into Swoop Aero?

• They pitched to Moonshot first and foremost with a problem to solve and showed us the tech they’d be using to do it with. It wasn’t a tech-first approach where they’d be searching for a problem.
• They were developing hardware, and we know the hardware commercialisation process well.
• They’re operating in a physical frontier (of course, we have had planes for a while, but using drones for last-mile vaccine delivery is a new area), and they derive value from comms satellites to communicate with their network over long distances.

JigSpace is another that causes some confusion. They are democratising the ability for everyday people to create and share AR models, all the way from school children learning about the layers of our planet, to helping multinational giants like Medtronic revolutionise the way they plan their workshops and office spaces – as demonstrated in the most recent annual Apple keynote to unveil the iPhone 12.

• A lot of the value from expansion into new physical frontiers is that they give us new perspectives to solve great problems, and often this happens when we combine that physical perspective with the digital world. The most valuable AR application, for example, is Google Maps. Jigspace is developing technologies that make it easier for anyone to embed spatial data and models into the real world.
• Jigspace had already completed some work with aerospace firms such as Lockheed Martin, and we saw an opportunity for their apps to become space-enabling services for space infrastructure companies to demonstrate their proposed engineering projects with others in a more impactful way. Jigspace allows you to put full-scale space stations, lunar landers and rocket ships in front of you – and to demonstrate their intricate designs and functions also.
• We’re continuing to work with Jigspace to help put their useful technologies into the hands of aerospace firms large and small.

One of the challenges we have at Moonshot is breaking outside of the traditional space bubble. Our mission is to grow the space ecosystem and to do this we need to broaden our focus to include those initially unintuitive startups that further enable access to frontier locations as Jigspace are doing, and those startups that leverage frontier locations and connect the space infrastructure value chains with end consumers just as Swoop Aero are doing. This means there’s a whole range of applications we know people are working on across the world, who wouldn’t consider themselves to be a space startup because they’re not in the aerospace industry.

With one week left for applications to our next global accelerator program, we’re calling on everyone to help us spread the word, If you’re a founder creating a revolutionary startup that is anything like one of the following examples, then Moonshot is your tribe – we’re ready to help you.

💊 A pharma startup manufacturing new medicines that need microgravity
🥦 An agriculture startup revolutionising our ability to grow food in inhospitable locations
🤖 A remote robotics startup developing machines to perform work at great distances like mining sites, deep in the ocean, or in orbit
🚚 A logistics startup using tech like drones, satellite comms, or GPS to move cargo more efficiently or where it as previously impossible
💻 A startup that creates a new market for underutilized manufacturing equipment
🔋 An energy startup commercializing a new way to generate or store electricity for remote locations

One thing is for sure, and it’s that space is not all about the rockets and satellites! So if you think this is you, apply today! 🚀

🚀 Apply for Moonshot 2021 Today 🚀