Apply to Moonshot

The reason we hear why most startups come to us is for our program, more than our capital. It’s a 3-month full-time accelerator for frontier-enabled businesses, and it provides you with a structure to more rapidly and effectively grow your business as well as provide you with a lifetime-membership within the most valuable space-tech startup network on the planet.

We’ve designed our program from the ground up to support space-tech. In fact, we work hard to tailor our offering to more specifically address the core needs of our eventual cohort – whether a startup is looking to launch a payload into orbit, or get access to new geo-spatial intelligence customers.

It’s a mentor-driven program. Unlike most accelerators, our mentors are aligned with you as they’re also the investors that have pooled their capital to form our fund, and they are active participants throughout the selection process, as well as acting as a core resource for you throughout the accelerator. The leaders of our community are the passionate mentors and investors of our accelerator – a rising tide lifts all boats.

The best part about joining Moonshot is that after the program you will continue to get all of the perks! You’ll be a part of the Moonshot community for life. One day, we hope, you’ll be able to share your success with the next generation of founders as a mentor, yourself.

What is a space startup?

This is a lot broader than you might initially expect. We’re interested to work with companies well beyond the aerospace industry.

An obvious space startup is one building infrastructure to support activity in outer space. This might include a ground-station-as-a-service startup for supporting telecommunications constellations. Perhaps it’s a robotics startup that can automate physical processes on a space station.

We also want to support startups that better enable space infrastructure to be built, which might involve novel manufacturing processes or a marketplace for selling existing space assets between multiple parties.

We believe that most of the startups are going to be those that leverage infrastructure in frontier locations. These span every industry and sector. A startup might use machine learning to process satellite data that can help farmers grow crops more efficiently. A pharmaceutical startup might be developing a novel cancer medicine that can only be manufactured in the absence of gravity, such as a space station in orbit.

The possibilities are endless, and we are looking forward to receiving a pile of amazing applications at a time where Nokia are building 4G coverage on the moon, Toyota are building a Lunar Rover, and Microsoft are using AR to help astronauts. If you’re in doubt, put in an application or reach out to us to ask!

This cohort we’ll be selecting 5 startups to receive investment and participate in our accelerator. We know that we’re going to get more applications from remarkable startups than we can accept, so if you apply and you’re not successful, don’t think that we think you’re not good enough! It’s just a reflection that we need to work harder to increase our bandwidth.

Our selection process is a democratic one, decided collectively by the input from each of our mentors. Each mentor brings a slightly different perspective when assessing your applications and your interview performance. depending on their own experience and connections. Throughout the process, mentors will be judging applicants based on key criteria, of which you can get to know at a high level at the bottom of this page.

Troy McCann – Founder and CEO
Email: troy@moonshotspace.co
Twitter: @troy_mccann
LinkedIn: Troy McCann
Nexus: Troy McCann

Tristonne Forbes – Head of Programs
Email: tristonne@moonshtospace.co
Twitter: @tristonne
LinkedIn: Tristonne Forbes
Nexus: Tristonne Forbes

This accelerator is a mentor-driven program, though. Our mentors include leading space entrepreneurs and leaders from across the globe, including Flavia Tata Nardini of Fleet Space, Adam Gilmour of Gilmour Space, Amir Blachman who is the Chief Business Officer at Axiom Space, and Dr. Andrew Aldrin.

We’re highly selective when it comes to our mentors, inviting only the best people who we know will provide founders with the resources they need to be remarkable.

It can sometimes be daunting for founders to find their feet in an accelerator. To make this process easier, and to provide you with a basic level of consistency throughout the program, we’ll pair you up with one mentor for you to meet with on at least a weekly basis. This mentor is your Champion and will look after you for the duration of the accelerator, in addition to the core team and other mentors you develop rapport with.

You can see all of our mentors listed here.

We’re offering investments at a fixed AU$40,000 for 4% equity in your company.

If you’ve already raised more than AU$250,000 of capital with this company previously, then we will invest at the terms of your most recent capital raise.

Notes:

• This doesn’t mean we believe your company is currently worth $1m. We believe that the value of a company is the total sum of future cash flows, and we don’t have a crystal ball to know what this is for a given early-stage startup. But we can help teams prove it to be greater than zero.
• We intend for the money to be the least valuable part of the Moonshot experience.
• We’re not investing using SAFE notes or convertible debt. This may change in the future, but for many space companies we’ve seen these dynamic contracts cause unnecessary challenges for space startups raising larger rounds in the future. We want to help reduce unnecessary uncertainty.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, we’ve designed our program to be conducted remotely. However, to get the most from your experience we hope that you’ll be able to spend the duration of the program living in Sydney, Australia. We will be responsibly maximizing the amount of face-to-face time we can, and by being close to us we will be able to better help you get access to strategic resources and facilities.

In particular, the week before the official program starts is Immersion Week. It’s a retreat to the outskirts of Sydney where we’ll all get to know each other and “break the ice”, and to set the stage for the next 12 weeks.

Please note that this means you will need to follow current instructions on travel intro or within Australia and the state of NSW. We will try to provide what assistance we can, as necessary. See below links for more information:

• NSW Travel Advice
• Coming into Australia

• January 19 – AMA session hosted by Moonshot CEO, Troy McCann. Click here to register.
• February 11, 23:59 AEST – Applications close.
• February 13-18 – The mentors will review all online applications and shortlist the top 15.
• February 22 – Online speed-interviews. Each team will spend 10 minutes with each mentor.
• February 23 – Final interviews with the top ranked teams will be organised.
• February 25 – Final 1-hour interview between each top team and Moonshot.
• March 15 – Immersion Week and accelerator start.

We’ll be hosting an AMA on January 19. You can register and find out more by clicking here.

We also have a thread open on our discussion forum for discussing all of your questions.

• Ask us any questions you have on our web forum (click here). We’ll share the most frequent questions and answers on this page.
• You can find an example of the application questions at the end of this page, or by clicking here.