Apex Scales Up With Ambitions To Become Premier Satellite Builder

Three years and one month ago, Apex did not exist. Now the company says it is ready to produce 200 satellite buses per year for defense and commercial customers.

The satellite manufacturing startup officially opened its Factory One production facility on Oct. 6 in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa Vista, where Howard Hughes’ private airfield and aircraft factory once stood.

• The company aims for vertical integration soon
• Bus manufacturing market remains largely closed

The facility spans more than 100,000 ft.² across two buildings; the first is open now for production and testing. An expansion scheduled to open by mid-2026 will support subassembly and integration. Factory One is expected to house production of Apex’s full satellite line—ranging from the Aries bus with a 150-kg (330-lb.) payload mass to the Nova, capable of carrying up to 300 kg, and the Comet, which can support more than 500 kg. All Apex satellites are designed for low Earth orbit, and the company offers an Aries variant for high-maneuverability and geostationary missions.

Apex has made no secret of its ambitions to become the space industry’s default bus manufacturer, drawing inspiration from Henry Ford’s streamlined assembly line. CEO Ian Cinnamon and Chief Technology Officer Maximilian Benassi co-founded the company in September 2022. The company launched its first operational satellite, the Aries SN1, 18 months later with customer payloads and an internal software testbed. A little more than three years after its founding, Apex is producing one satellite per month and has about a dozen Aries spacecraft for undisclosed customers awaiting launch “very soon,” Cinnamon said at the event.

Few Apex customers are publicly known. Anduril and Booz Allen Hamilton provided payloads for the Aries SN1, and Apex says it has built satellites for multiple Tier 1 defense primes as well as the U.S. Space Development Agency, NASA and allied partners. About 20% of its business is direct-to-government; the remaining 80% is evenly split between supply system integrators and commercial companies, Cinnamon said.

A recent $200 million Series D financing round boosted the startup’s valuation to more than $1 billion. The company has more than $350 million in the bank to keep scaling and investing in new technology, Cinnamon said while hosting a Factory One tour for Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr prior to the Oct. 6 ceremony. To remain independent, Apex is focused on streamlining its products and keeping costs low enough to profit on each satellite sale.

With Factory One online, Apex plans to become almost entirely vertically integrated—building flight computers, reaction wheels, ethernet switches and avionics in-house. Since the Aries SN1 launch, the company has increased internal production markedly. That satellite was made with about 60% purchased parts and 40% in-house components, Cinnamon said.

Meanwhile, about 70% of the parts for a Nova spacecraft, scheduled to launch in June, are slated to be produced in-house. Apex expects 90% of its satellite components to be manufactured in-house within the next 18 months, he said.

The company also is scouting locations worldwide for a second facility, Factory Two, that could open in the coming years near payload developers and launch sites. Cape Canaveral and international sites that would benefit allied nations are being considered, Cinnamon told Aviation Week.

Factory One is scaling production annually, but Apex could build as many as 200 satellites per year within 12 months of receiving orders, depending on launch availability. “We try to marry how many we’re producing with what the market will actually take,” he said.

Launching an independent satellite bus company has been tried before. A wave of manufacturing startups entered the market in the past 5-10 years chasing demand from new commercial constellations, says Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. Many were eventually acquired by major contractors: Terran Orbital, Millennium Space Systems and Blue Canyon Technologies were bought by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and RTX, respectively.

Payload developers are increasingly choosing to build their own buses to control costs and offer full-stack systems, Henry notes, citing remote-sensing companies, such as Planet, Umbra and Iceye. To stand out in a crowded market, Apex needs to “build a lot of satellites—and quickly,” he says.

Novaspace, a space consulting firm, projects that 43,000 satellites will be launched by 2034, most destined for five megaconstellations planned by the U.S., China, SpaceX and Amazon. Defense remains a key driver, accounting for 48% of manufacturing and launch value over the next decade. As the Trump administration looks to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the proposed Golden Dome missile defense architecture, Apex is pitching its Comet satellite as the bus platform for new space-based interceptors and is eyeing other orbital elements of the program.

Still, the manufacturing market remains largely closed. Novaspace estimates that just 7% of the market is fully open to any supplier.

As humanity looks beyond Earth, Apex aims to play a role by providing the satellite buses that enable critical communications, military support and other services needed in orbit, Cinnamon said. Looking ahead 20 years, he envisions applying efficiencies in Apex’s production model to support orbital data centers and satellite mesh networks, the way SpaceX’s operational efficiencies have transformed space-based technology.

In the long term, Cinnamon said he wants Apex to become “the backbone of space infrastructure for many, many generations.” Cinnamon sold his first company, a dual-use artificial intelligence startup called Synapse Technology Corp., to Palantir, but he asserts that mergers and acquisitions are not in Apex’s plans.

“If we ever get purchased or merged with a prime, . . . we have failed,” he said.