Rafferty Jackson hosts the Startup Space competition in 2022. Via Satellite/Access Intelligence photo

As the Startup Space pitch competition celebrates its 10th anniversary at this year’s SATShow Week, organizers, judges, and past-year winners say it has become a true on-ramp to the commercial space economy — especially for founders who once had no visible path onto major industry stages.

When the competition launched in 2015, Jeffrey Hill, now executive chairman of SATELLITE, was hoping to fill a gap he noticed in how major space conferences, including SATELLITE, catered to large, established firms but not emerging companies.

Hill’s answer was a Shark Tank-style pitch event placed in the middle of the exhibit hall, held over two hours on Tuesday, the first day the hall opens. “If you’re walking into the exhibit hall, you just see this thing happening,” Hill said.

Rafferty Jackson, an investment committee member for Seraphim Space Venture Fund, was Hill’s go-to person to help make Startup Space a successful event. Hill notes that Jackson enjoyed significant success in the consumer space even before she moved to the space sector.

“This is one of the reasons I was drawn to work with her as a partner.  She was part of the team that helped close the deal that sold Beats by Dr. Dre to Apple,” said Hill, referring to Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics and Beats Music in 2014 that brought the legendary hip-hop producer to Apple, with Beats Music forming the foundation for Apple Music.

Startup Space’s open-theater format came in response to Jackson questioning, “Why aren’t space industry events like rock concerts? Why aren’t there people standing around, watching this cool stuff?”

For Jackson, Startup Space embodies her mission as a storyteller: getting world-changing deep tech out of the lab and into the world. She has built a structured pitch format and training program that all 10 finalists get ahead of the competition.

Her coaching ensures that even deeply technical founders — many pitching for the first time — can make their ideas land with a non-technical audience of investors, primes and government decision-makers.

Femi Ishola (center left), founder of Phemotron Systems, won Startup Space 2025. Photo: Access Intelligence

Major Draw at SATELLITE

The annual competition has become a must-see event at SATELLITE, drawing on average 400 people to the high-stakes pitch fest.

Hill estimates that about 75% of Startup Space competitors go on to succeed — moving through Series A and B and often reaching their stated goals, such as landing a key U.S. Army or international government contract. Around a dozen alumni have become market-leading “radical success” companies, including publicly traded firms and high-profile players like LeoLabs.

The competition’s footprint has also grown more global. In the early years, only two or three of the 10 finalists typically came from outside the United States and Canada. Over the last five years, the field has shifted to roughly half international and half North American. This year’s finalists include startups from Japan, India, Australia, Italy, the U.K. and the U.S., including an Africa-founded company now based stateside.

Shaping what wins on stage is a collaboration between organizers and judges. Jackson observes, “A great pitch is all about the customer problem, living and dying by it, not by what you make.”

“The best startup pitches I’ve heard always have a story,” says longtime judge Alison Perez, a former senior investment manager at Lockheed Martin Ventures who recently was promoted to the corporate development team, where she serves as director of Mergers and Acquisition Strategy and Integration.

Perez says judges evaluate not just the novelty of a technology, but also whether the companies demonstrate rational, fundable business models and a clear understanding of their customers — criteria that align closely with Jackson’s emphasis on problem-first storytelling.

For Jackson, the ultimate measure of success goes beyond any single winner, to how well the startup’s big ideas translate to the audience, who then can serve as storytellers for the startup.

Daniel Faber, CEO of Orbit Fab, won the pitch competition in 2019 for his vision of creating the “Gas stations in Space” company. “[Winning Startup Space] helped increase our profile in advance of our seed round, which closed in 2020. It was one of the articles we shared with early-stage investors to establish credibility and served us so well for two to three years afterwards,” Faber says.

Perez says Faber’s pitch was memorable because “his North Star was always very clear.”

“I think that is why people were so drawn to his vision,” she says.

Today, Orbit Fab is a pioneering leader in in-space refueling, successfully launching the first commercial fuel depot in LEO and having secured over $28.5 million in Series A funding, with multiple government and commercial contracts for fuel delivery in GEO.

One founder who saw Faber’s presentation at SATELLITE was Patrick Shannon, CEO of TrustPoint GPS, which is developing a commercial GPS alternative for global positioning and timing.

“I’ve known Daniel for over a decade. Seeing Orbit Fab win put the competition more front and center in my mind,” recalls Shannon, who won the pitch contest in 2024. Participating, he insists, made a big difference for his own fundraising efforts. “It raised our visibility tremendously.”

The company is developing a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) micro-satellite constellation that delivers C-band GNSS services as a modern complement to legacy GPS systems.

“Startup Space brings the cream of the crop of the venture world to center stage among the larger industry,” Shannon says, noting that the heavy foot traffic at the event translated into valuable follow-on interest.

“There were inbound investor interactions that came directly from that day,” Shannon recalls. “There was also strong media coverage, which really elevated our position from a PR standpoint. Our message got out there, and that’s exactly what we were hoping for.”

Beyond Winning

According to Hill, the value of the competition extends beyond the winners, citing the first company to ever apply, SWISSto12, didn’t result in a win for the RF provider now disrupting the industry with small, low-cost GEO satellites and antennas that leverage 3D-printing technology.

“Being on stage in front of primes, investors and partners put them on the industry’s radar early,” says Hill. The company now is among the fastest-growing aerospace firms in the world, with CEO and Founder Emile de Rijk named last year’s SATELLITE Executive of the Year.

“Winning isn’t the point. The real win is access to the stage and the audience,” says Jackson.

In the years since Startup Space launched, the commercial space sector has matured, with capital becoming more selective, say competition officials. Startup founders are under growing pressure to communicate not just what they’ve built, but why it matters.

Few people see this dynamic more clearly than Perez, in her fourth year judging the competition. What truly separates top-tier pitches, says Perez, is a compelling narrative that makes a complex business instantly graspable.

“The best startup pitches that I’ve heard always have a story,” Perez says.

That story can be personal, rooted in a founder’s years confronting the same pain point, or built around a larger industry shift, such as the emergence of a new manufacturing capability that unlocks a better way to tackle an old problem. Either way, the goal is the same: help a sophisticated but time-pressed audience quickly understand why this particular company matters.

The pitch must be digestible, conversational, and framed so that a layperson could grasp the stakes. Overloading listeners with jargon and detail can strip away the “specialness” people want to rally around and weaken the emotional connection to the company’s vision.

A Decade of Change in Space Investment

Perez has watched the broader space investment landscape transform over the last decade. The industry’s first wave of innovation centered on commoditizing launch and spacecraft buses, dramatically lowering the cost of access to orbit and “democratizing” space.

Now that foundation is in place, she sees attention shifting toward what goes on those platforms and how long they last. Areas like sensing and payloads, data quality, and communications throughput are becoming especially important as government and commercial customers demand more reliable, higher-value information from space-based assets.

Lockheed Martin, she notes, is particularly focused on payloads that enhance the quality of data for government customers and improve the reliability of data transfer both in space and down to Earth. Advances in these areas are not happening in isolation; they’re often driven by or accelerated through small, fast-moving startups.

Perez sees space startups as critical catalysts in an industry long dominated by large, risk-averse institutions. While agencies often must remain conservative, startups can take on hard problems with bigger risks and faster iteration cycles.

The Startup Space competition lowers the barrier for investors, strategics and partners to encounter new ventures and reinforces what Perez describes as “a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats- mentality.” When startups succeed, major primes benefit, and when large incumbents thrive, they can, in turn, create more opportunity and access for startups.

Perez urges founders competing at SATELLITE to move beyond “newer, better, faster” as a pitch, to clearly articulate how the company pushes the industry forward — whether by enabling new kinds of missions, opening fresh markets, or making previously impractical capabilities viable.

“Have that clear goal of what you want to accomplish and make it big and lofty because you want to capture people’s imagination of what’s possible,” she advises.

Faber’s advice for this year’s competitors is even more succinct: “Profile and credibility are important. Lean into that.”