Voyager Technologies CEO: Starlab, Golden Dome, Palantir & the Moon

With Palantir, we're working on an edge computing solution. And just to be clear, Nick, it's a 25% blended organic CAGR. Let me say it another way: if we don't achieve a $10 billion enterprise value in the medium term, we will have done something wrong on our execution.

Thank you, Nick. Great to be with you.

Yeah, sure. Well, again, great to be with you, Nick. Think about someone who was in the business world their entire career, mainly running public companies. That was really my skill set, if I had one, but in industries, frankly, Nick, that I wasn't super passionate about. Lifelong space nut since a very young age and really found my way home, so to speak. When we had the idea of founding Voyager, I had already been doing early-stage investing in the space industry for quite some time up to that point, really mainly just learning about the business plans and the founders and the technology and just getting excited about what the future held. The core thesis of Voyager kind of emanated from that, which was could you build a company that was the best of both worlds? Specifically, what I mean by that is prime contractor capable, right? Because my observation was the larger companies that were capable of doing these really cool missions weren't particularly ambitious, and then the companies that were very ambitious, forward-leaning, highly innovative, leaning into the technology curve, didn't necessarily have the capability, or were founder-led—tremendously brilliant founder, but maybe didn't know how to scale their business, maybe didn't know how to raise capital, maybe didn't know how to actually achieve these larger aims. So the core thesis was can you create the best of both worlds, a prime capable company denominated on innovation, entrepreneurialism, and really leaning into this future that we all believe in? The thought was if you could do that, which is very difficult, of course, but if you could do that, two things would happen. One is the customer would gravitate towards a company like that because they were looking for new options and new choices. Probably more importantly, Nick, the best people in the industry would gravitate towards a company like that. So that was the original thesis. We turned seven years old two weeks ago and still have a lot of work to do, of course, but I think in that seven years, we've demonstrated that that core thesis is really valid and we're chipping away at the dream, so to speak.

Yeah, it's super important, Nick. But the right way, I think, to think about energetics is think of it in terms of critical inputs and vertical integration. So, let me start with the headline. The headline is mission-critical solutions, right? We're patriots. We believe it's really important that we're in a very significant race, not only in the space arena, but in the national security arena with our primary rival, China. There are really important outcomes that matter, right? Not only return to the Moon, but things like Golden Dome and protecting the Western allied nations, if you will. That's all really, really important. So that's the core mission. Under that framework, mission-critical solutions become really paramount. For example, we're on Next Generation Interceptor, which is intercepting nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles from adversaries like China, North Korea, and Russia. So in that headline of mission-critical solutions, it's really important that you not only have key technologies there, but that you control the various inputs to make sure that you can deliver a system that works, right? In that value chain mapping—we look at things in terms of value chain and contributions of value not only from a financial return perspective, but from a how do we take more control over the outcome of the system. In that whole context, propulsion is really driven by a lot of these inputs that require energetics, right? Pretty much every solid rocket motor requires an energetic solution, and a lot of those perchlorates and inputs in those fuel sources and energetic sources were offshore or have been offshore. So in evaluating that, we thought, "Okay, energetics is going to be really, really important." Think of it as a critical mineral almost, and we want to be really important contributors to that, not only in terms of controlling that as an input, but scaling the production of it as well. So yes, energetics is critical. Energetics is a key part of our business. It's a moat, as you said, but it's a moat with a means to an end, which is this entire propulsion technology stack, which is really, really important for things like Golden Dome.

That's right. Well said. Yep, well said.

Because our technology works. We were very fortunate in that our key propulsion technology that's on Next Generation Interceptor was validated past Critical Design Review. As I mentioned, NGI is hypersonic missile interception, so in many respects, that's the highest technical standard within the Golden Dome framework. Above that sits space-based interceptors, but in terms of the technical problem of intercepting something going Mach 6 or 7, it's a very challenging technical problem. So the fact that we had passed Critical Design Review with our technology on a system that complex and that mission-critical had a lot to do with it. I also think—I'd like to talk more about this on our next earnings call, Nick—I could give some specific case studies on how we went from a napkin drawing on a particular design for a program to a hot-fire test in 100 days, 150 days. That's just unheard of at most other companies, right? So that's again leaning into this talent pool that we have, this innovation culture that we have. I think it's a combination between the tech that we have that works, our ability to move fast and create systems that plug into what our customers want, and when you marry those two, we become a very reliable partner. As you mentioned, we're very proud to be partnered with the companies you mentioned. There's a couple others that we haven't announced yet. So we're pretty deeply penetrated into the various programs because we're actually delivering results for them.

Think of our organic growth engine, Nick, as a flywheel that we've created. Part of it is the technology stack that we currently have competing and winning on what client requirements are currently coming out, and so that flywheel has been very successful. Our pipeline continues to grow in terms of the total addressable market that we're able to compete on. For example, we just added Lunar, as you know, which is a big part, and our ability to build the pipeline and then ultimately backlog—you saw that on our last earnings call—and then translate that into revenue. In addition to that, because we're leaning heavily into this innovation curve, we're also able to come up with new solutions for our customers that they might not necessarily have already asked for, right? Anticipating these needs. This Agentic AI platform is an example of that. As you correctly pointed out, it's for a classified customer. We can't talk much about it, but what I can say is it's an original solution that the customer is very excited about, and it's something that we think we're the only ones in the market that are able to provide this particular solution. I think that is a great example of how it's at the intersection of what we have innovated on and what the customer sees as valuable or something that could help them in the future. So we're actually opening up a new market, right? A new frontier, if you will. I said at the time when we won that—it was pretty vague, I think I posted it on X—that looking back in a few years, we might look at that win as the most significant, or one of the most significant wins in the history of the company. I still believe that, and I wish I could be more specific about it, but the general point applies, which is the organic growth engine flywheel has been built. That's going great. But we're also opening up new market opportunities in areas of our innovation curve, if you will, that are continuing to surprise us and continuing to surprise our customers. Just one final point on that is it's not just a North American play here, so to speak. As we know, a lot of NATO allies are building these technology solutions into their particular designs. Their budgets are increasing both on the space and national security side. So we're opening up new markets as well internationally, which we're pretty excited about.

Yeah, and just to be clear, Nick, it's a 25% blended organic CAGR. The defense growth rate is actually higher. So that's blended, including the space and the national security side of things. And by the way, this is all pre-Starlab. So we're not even talking about Starlab when we talk about these numbers.

Sure.

No, the short answer is no. With Palantir, we're working on an edge computing solution. Think of Space Edge as really flipping the model that has currently been perceived. Compute on orbit has always been bespoke. It's always been we need to build compute or a processor for a particular application. The whole idea with Space Edge is that this is a cloud computing device, for lack of a better word, that's programmable and isn't mission-specific. The mission comes after the fact, not before the fact, right? So think of that as really the concept behind it. Of course, we installed that on the ISS. It's fully commissioned and ready to achieve its aim, so to speak. So it's really inverting that model, and of course that's where the market is going, right? There are two concepts in space computing that we had seen from a mile away, and a lot of other people had seen as well, which is this whole notion of rather than collecting data, transmitting it back to Earth, putting it on the cloud, creating an answer, and then sending the answer to the customer, do all that at the point of information collection and transmit the answer directly to the customer, so to speak. So that's a key thesis that we're building towards. Then the second is this whole notion of the actual cloud itself, the actual compute infrastructure itself being on orbit. Then, of course, other picks-and-shovels aspects to our business play into this, like laser communication, right? Because when you're transmitting a lot of data around, not only from space to Earth, but from space to space, the Ka-band just doesn't work right at the levels that we're talking about. So you really do need things like laser comm for that type of data, not only in terms of throughput, but in terms of speed as well. So yeah, that's what we're building towards and it's a super exciting initiative. Of course, with Starlab, which we'll get to, the power that we have on station is so much more dramatically scaled compared to a particular node on a satellite. You can do some really interesting things on compute as well on a station. So that's another part of what we're building towards.