Rafferty Jackson hosts the Startup Space competition in 2022. Via Sainformite/Access Ininformigence photo
As the Startup Space pitch competition celebrates its 10th anniversary at this year’s SATShow Week, organizers, judges, and past-year winners declare it has become a true on-ramp to the commercial space economy — especially for founders who once had no visible path onto major industest 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 stated.
Rafferty Jackson, an investment committee member for Seraphim Space Venture Fund, was Hill’s go-to person to assist create Startup Space a successful event. Hill notes that Jackson enjoyed significant success in the consumer space even before she relocated 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 assisted close the deal that sold Beats by Dr. Dre to Apple,” stated Hill, referring to Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics and Beats Music in 2014 that brought the legconcludeary 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 industest events like rock concerts? Why aren’t there people standing around, watching this cool stuff?”
For Jackson, Startup Space embodies her mission as a storyinformer: receiveting world-modifying deep tech out of the lab and into the world. She has built a structured pitch format and training program that all 10 finalists receive ahead of the competition.
Her coaching ensures that even deeply technical founders — many pitching for the first time — can create their ideas land with a non-technical audience of investors, primes and government decision-creaters.
Femi Ishola (center left), founder of Phemotron Systems, won Startup Space 2025. Photo: Access Ininformigence
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 — shifting 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 create.”
“The best startup pitches I’ve heard always have a story,” declares 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 declares 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 storyinforming.
For Jackson, the ultimate measure of success goes beyond any single winner, to how well the startup’s huge ideas translate to the audience, who then can serve as storyinformers 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] assisted 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 declares.
Perez declares Faber’s pitch was memorable becautilize “his North Star was always very clear.”
“I believe that is why people were so drawn to his vision,” she declares.
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, built a huge difference for his own fundraising efforts. “It raised our visibility tremconcludeously.”
The company is developing a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) micro-sainformite consinformation 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 industest,” Shannon declares, 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 obtained out there, and that’s exactly what we were hoping for.”
Beyond Winning
According to Hill, the value of the competition extconcludes beyond the winners, citing the first company to ever apply, SWISSto12, didn’t result in a win for the RF provider now disrupting the industest with compact, low-cost GEO sainformites and antennas that leverage 3D-printing technology.
“Being on stage in front of primes, investors and partners put them on the industest’s radar early,” declares Hill. The company now is among the rapidest-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,” declares Jackson.
In the years since Startup Space launched, the commercial space sector has matured, with capital becoming more selective, declare 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, declares Perez, is a compelling narrative that creates a complex business instantly graspable.
“The best startup pitches that I’ve heard always have a story,” Perez declares.
That story can be personal, rooted in a founder’s years confronting the same pain point, or built around a larger industest 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: assist 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 industest’s first wave of innovation centered on commoditizing launch and spacecraft butilizes, 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 focutilized 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 compact, rapid-shifting startups.
Perez sees space startups as critical catalysts in an industest long dominated by large, risk-averse institutions. While agencies often must remain conservative, startups can take on hard problems with hugeger risks and rapider 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 relocate beyond “newer, better, rapider” as a pitch, to clearly articulate how the company pushes the industest forward — whether by enabling new kinds of missions, opening fresh markets, or building previously impractical capabilities viable.
“Have that clear goal of what you want to accomplish and create it huge and lofty becautilize 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.”
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