Integration, Test, and Operations Platform Epsilon3 Backed by Y Combinator
My name is Laura Crabtree, and I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Epsilon3.
I’ve spent my entire career focused on space: I participated in nearly 100 rocket launches at SpaceX and Northrop Grumman. They weren’t always seamless — I learned a great deal about efficiencies and how to better communicate amongst a group of extremely high-performing and talented engineers. I never realized how much my master’s degree studies on reducing the time required for processes would come in handy. Throughout my decade-plus time in the industry, time spent heads down on F9, Dragon, and our crew, I never fully appreciated how much the industry had transformed.
Epsilon3 was born out of the transformations. As we embarked on founding the company, several of our close friends and advisors recommended we apply to Y Combinator (YC). YC is a highly selective startup accelerator (sometimes referred to as the Harvard or Navy SEALs of accelerators) that has backed many of the most successful companies in the world like Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, Dropbox, Relativity Space, Astranis, and Boom Aerospace. They fund the most promising startups from across the world and provide bootcamps, workshops, individualized guidance, and support to guide the companies in their community.
When we applied to Y Combinator earlier this year, we had just begun to define our product. In the three weeks between our application and our interview, we built our minimum viable product. We had multiple customers on the platform giving us active feedback and encouraging us to build more and move faster. The moment I saw people actually using the tool we dreamt up, I realized that Epsilon3 wasn’t just a dream — we really could provide the tools the industry sorely needs. Our YC interviewers believed in us and our product, and to our surprise accepted us into the program. I knew about the industry I wanted to serve, I knew what we needed to build, I knew who to talk to about building it, but I needed to learn how to build and run a business. That’s where YC came in. Since being accepted into YC, a few surprising things have happened:
I’ve pushed myself to learn more about business than I ever thought possible.
I’ve been reading books, news articles, and blog posts about not only space (which, admittedly I did before), but about emerging industries, legacy industries, and so much more.
I’ve also learned that our business use-case is applicable across so many more industries that I could have thought possible.
Epsilon3 is the spacecraft and launch OS, but we’re becoming so much more than that. We’re becoming the platform that many companies now use to run all their integration and testing and eventual operations. We’re learning about use cases in renewable energy, robotics, fusion, eVTOL, drones, trains, EVs, AVs, etc. We are excited to be able to expand our support into fields within spacecraft operations, launch operations, and beyond. We want to bring efficiency in data collection, communications and operations to all industries that need to operate safely and efficiently.
We’re so excited and grateful to be part of this summer’s YC accelerator program. We can’t wait to work with so many amazing and innovative companies within the space industry and beyond.
If you’re running complex operations of any sort (whether in testing or in production), reach out, and we’d love to help.
