Hop Aero announced 11 million dollars in funding at the end of September, following its participation in the summer Y Combinator batch. Co-founder and chief executive Matija Milenovic told Payload the company ended up raising more than it had initially planned, and that it had been fortunate enough to turn down a number of good funds.
The origin of the company is an irritation.
At his previous startup, Milenovic’s team was given 24 hours’ notice to put satellite propulsion hardware in the hands of a mission integrator. No courier could guarantee the delivery, so he flew a 23 hour round trip and hand-carried it. Co-founder Jacob Balaj had encountered the same problem from the opposite end while serving in the US Marine Corps after Typhoon Haiyan, where orders to deliver medicine and food were repeatedly blocked by aircraft breakdowns, missing parts and crew fatigue.
Milenovic’s framing of why that became a company is worth quoting as reasoning rather than as inspiration: if the US military, all the way down to a small startup, has had this problem, there is probably a large market in between.
That sentence is a complete market-sizing methodology, and it is better than most of the ones that come with spreadsheets attached.
Most founders start from a product idea and then go looking for people who might want it. The sequence here runs the other way. A specific, concrete failure happened to them personally. They then checked whether the failure was theirs alone or structural, found it occurring at both extremes of scale, and reasoned that the middle was populated.
The discipline that makes this work is the check. Plenty of people have a bad experience and conclude that somebody should fix it. Very few go and establish whether anyone else has the same problem, how often, and whether they currently pay to work around it. Milenovic’s 23 hour flight was itself the willingness-to-pay evidence, in the most expensive possible currency.
The company has been building at speed. It has a 1.25 million dollar contract with the US Air Force, completed a tethered flight of a small-scale prototype, and credits its pace to in-house software modelled on tools Milenovic encountered in the industry. It is now developing its full-scale vehicle, expanding at the Oklahoma Spaceport, and targeting flight in 2027.
Payload’s own reporting is admirably unsentimental about what remains unproven: nothing has flown untethered, and the hardest problem in the entire category, landing intact and on target, has not yet been addressed. Propulsion and payload deployment have been de-risked. The landing has not.
That honesty is worth noting too, because the version of this story told by the company alone would be a straight line, and the version worth learning from includes the part that has not happened.
A courier said no, once.
He has not stopped working on it since.
Source: Payload Space, “Exclusive: Hop Aero Raises $11M for Suborbital Point-to-Point Delivery”
