Crossing the Valley

How Lux Aeterna Is Building a Market the Pentagon Didn’t Ask For

About Brian

Brian Taylor spent about fifteen years as a mechanical engineer before he ever sat in the founder’s chair. He came up through aviation and aerospace, then landed at SpaceX, where he did development, qualification, and testing on Starlink satellites, including the structural qualification of the first stack of 60. From there it was Amazon’s Project Kuiper for high rate satellite production, then Loft Orbital.

But despite this tour d’force through a who’s who of space companies, by his own admission, Brian was never a space nerd. It really bugged him that you would work that hard on something, and unless you happen to be an astronaut, you would never see the hardware again. You do not get to iterate on it. You do not get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

An engineer who wants his hardware back. That frustration became a company.

About Lux Aeterna

Lux Aeterna builds fully reusable satellites. While there’s been lots of attention heaped on the rockets, Brian and Lux are focused on the satellite itself. The goal is to fly the mission, survive re-entry, land intact, refurbish it, put a new payload on it, and send it back up.

Brian founded the company in Denver in August 2024. It came out of stealth in June 2025 with a $4 million pre-seed led by Space Capital, and closed a $10 million oversubscribed seed led by Konvoy in March 2026, bringing the total to $14 million.

The company’s first vehicle is called Delphi. It is roughly 200 kilograms, built around a rigid conical heat shield that doubles as the satellite’s primary structure, with a parachute assisted return. It will fly on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare in Q1 2027, with recovery at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia through a partnership with Southern Launch. The company holds a Space Act Agreement with NASA Ames and two CRADAs supporting the re-entry and thermal protection work, and has stood up a Defense Advisory Board.

The entire payload capacity for that first mission is already sold out, across civil, defense, and commercial customers, hardware and software, small companies and large.

Also worth noting for the culture watchers: he did this interview from inside a sauna. An actual, off the shelf sauna, sitting on the production floor, because it was cheaper than the fancy sound-proof pods that Google puts all over its offices. The idiot index on that thing has to be excellent.

For more on Lux Aeterna: https://www.luxaeterna.com/

Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjtaylor/

For more Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Background

Cyber operations have always lived in the shadows of the national security conversation. In the wake of the Department of War suspending CMMC Level 2 guidance, this episode unpacks the essential, high-stakes, and rarely understood world of cyber security, as Sam Jones, CEO and co-founder of Method Security, joins Noah to talk about building autonomous offensive and defensive cyber capability for the U.S. government and the country’s most critical enterprises.

We go deep on why the “post-Mythos” moment has changed the calculus for every CISO in America.

About Sam

Sam Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Method Security. His path into cyber started early: an internship at GDIT the summer after high school introduced him to network penetration testing and defensive systems work, and a SMART scholarship later routed him into Air Force Cyber in San Antonio as a civilian operator, where he progressed from a GS-7 to a GS-11 …in just one year. He left convinced the government's real problem wasn't talent acquisition but talent retention. ("It's nice to have these short tour duties to get people in, but you want to create the criteria to keep people around.")

Sam had wanted to work at Palantir since he was 18, after stumbling on early Gotham demos on YouTube. Rejected from his first internship application in 2010, he came back and joined after leaving government in 2014, spending five years there building cyber products and meeting his two future co-founders, Sean and Dan. After Palantir, Sam joined Shield AI as roughly its 25th employee, working on autonomy for robots operating in real-world, no-fail missions. This experience planted the seed for Method’s core idea: applying that same flavor of self-directed autonomy to cybersecurity.

That idea sat dormant, passed back and forth between Sam and his future co-founders for years, until GPT-4 arrived in 2023 and gave them the technical ingredient they’d been missing. Within six hours of Sam raising the idea, both co-founders were in, and the three quickly quit their jobs to found Method Security.

About Method Security

Method Security builds autonomous cyber systems for the U.S. government and critical enterprises, applying autonomy to a blend of offensive and defensive missions, from red teaming to vulnerability research and penetration testing. The company’s core bet is that organizations need to move faster than adversaries without sacrificing trust, governance, or control, and that this capability needs to be operator-owned and enterprise-governed. The unifying question: how do you secure systems faster, in-house, to outpace adversaries, while keeping the human operator in command?

Founded in September 2023 by three Palantir alumni, Method quickly closed a seed round with Andreessen Horowitz within about a week of pitching. Rather than immediately going to market, they went heads-down for roughly six months focusing entirely on building the product they knew they needed. When they finally came up for air, they quickly landing their first Fortune 500 design partner (around nine months in), and their first federal contract soon followed, in the form of a direct-to-Phase-II SBIR with the Space Force (around eleven months in). Deliberately, Method has never split its team into separate commercial and federal go-to-market functions — Sam describes it as intentionally absorbing the “pain” from both markets into one product organization so that tension shapes the platform from the ground up.

Today, Method serves both government and Fortune 500 customers, with a particular focus on institutions that have the most to lose.

Top 5 Takeaways

* People are more important than the idea. Method’s founding team spent nearly five years trading startup ideas back and forth in shared Notion docs before landing on the one that stuck. The team and the working relationship mattered more than any single idea. Early stage investors are quick to highly cofounder pairings as a key determinant of success or failure, and Method’s team had de-risked their relationship through years of collaboration at Palantir and beyond.

* One team, two markets. It is rather unusual to see a single team tackle both sides of “dual use” simultaneously, without hiring differently. Cybersecurity is likely one of the few markets in which such an approach could succeed. Method intentionally runs a single product team that feels pressure from both markets simultaneously. Sam compares it to the strongman “Hercules Hold” — enduring the pain of both sides at once and translating it directly into product.

* Heads-down beats over-iterating. After closing their seed round, the founders deliberately limited outside feedback and focused on building conviction around what the market needed, rather than chasing every piece of user input. Too much feedback, too early, can pull a founding team away from the thing they were actually built to build.

* The “post-Mythos” moment reshaped the market. As frontier-class AI models become available to adversaries, boards are now directly asking their CISOs what their response plan is. That question has become one of Method’s most effective go-to-market unlocks. At the same time, Sam is wary of blanket regulation of large language models themselves, arguing the real risk lies in how models get wielded by software platforms, not in the models alone, and that overregulating relative to unregulated open-weight alternatives could put U.S. companies at a disadvantage.

* A correct prediction is worth more than a fast pivot.It’s worth reiterating that Method didn't iterate its way to product-market fit. The co-founders deeply studied the market for a decade, formed strong opinions, and stayed heads-down through a dark first year while outside voices pushed different directions. When the moment came, Method was an obvious answer with a deep, already-published technical answer. That kind of conviction is a massive unlock.

For more on Method Security: www.method.security

For more on Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Follow Sam: LinkedIn | X

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Crossing the Valley is a podcast on technology, defense, and national security. Watch the full conversation with Sam Jones on YouTube, and find Method Security’s careers page if you’re interested in joining their mission.

About Ryan Westerdahl

Before starting Turion, Ryan spent nine years as an engineer at SpaceX, joining not long after the company’s sixth flight and working under Kevin Wu — an engineering leader Ryan credits as one of the best of his generation (now leads engineering at Relativity Space). Ryan’s interest in space dates back to 2002, when he first saw an NPR segment about the discovery of exoplanets that set him on his life mission.

About Turion Space

Turion Space is a space technology company built around a long-term vision: extracting economic value from space beyond satellite communications — ultimately, asteroid mining. Rather than raising all of the (massive) capital that vision would require up front, Turion is executing what it calls the “Starforge” strategy: decomposing that future architecture into discrete, scalable business portfolios — tactical space, space logistics, geospatial/ISR, and an underlying mission software and ground-operations stack (branded Starfire OS) — each capable of generating revenue and proving technology on its own timeline.

Turion went through Y Combinator after months of rejection from accelerators and VCs unfamiliar with space’s capital requirements. Since then, the company has closed an oversubscribed $85M Series B, secured a STRATFI, and won a position on Space Systems Command’s RG-XX IDIQ — a program for next-generation proliferated surveillance and reconnaissance in geosynchronous orbit.

For more Turion Space: https://www.turionspace.com/

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Follow Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwesterdahl/

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About Jackie Barbieri

Jackie is the founder and CEO of Whitespace. She began her career supporting the counter-IED mission during the surge in Iraq, working as a red-team analyst. She was a threat emulator who studied the tactics, ideology, and bomb-making techniques of adversary networks, often in Arabic on the dark web, then fused that with classified collection. That experience, and witnessing what timely intelligence does for operators downrange, became the through-line of everything she’s built since.

Jackie returned to grad school to study what changed after 9/11, and got pulled into an R&D community around Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI) — a methodology that made trained analysts roughly 300x more effective. Notably, Jackie has a liberal arts background, not an engineering one. And, fun fact: she founded Whitespace in 2014 when her first child was six months old (there’s something about young parents as founders…)

About Whitespace

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Alexandria, VA, Whitespace builds sensemaking AI for defense and intelligence. The company bootstrapped for roughly a decade, funding technology development through consulting revenue, before raising a small seed round in 2025 (~$3.2M per public reporting) backed by family offices and a few VCs.

Its early IP, Worldline, is a simulation engine that creates a digital twin of a city-sized population observed by a synthetic sensor architecture, to generate realistic, multi-sensor training data. That capability won Whitespace its first prime contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in 2017 to build the ABI curriculum for the entire intelligence community, which the company then instructed for nearly eight years.

The flagship product today is Iris: an agentic AI “analyst” that lets operators self-serve pattern-of-life intelligence in natural language. Under the hood, Iris is built on ABI tradecraft translated into a toolkit of deterministic algorithms, wrapped in an agentic system carrying the persona and judgment of experienced analysts. Iris can run standalone, alongside human SMEs, or headless via API — and is designed for a future where her biggest user group may be other agents and autonomous platforms, not people.

Notably, by the time the company raised venture capital, it had flipped from ~80% services / 20% product to ~80% product / 20% services, 4X’d ARR, doubled revenue, and roughly doubled headcount.

For more on Whitespace: inthewhitespace.com

Follow Jackie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-barbieri/

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com | youtube.com/@CrossingTheValley

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About Phil Duong

Phil Duong is the CEO and co-founder of Noda AI. The son of Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with little money and speaking little English, he grew up in a family of service members who had fought for their freedom. His heritage left him with a deep sense of patriotism and a drive, as he puts it, to repay the country “multiple lives’ worth.” He won a spot at West Point but walked away from it when a childhood medical issue blocked him from branching aviation, calling the Marine Corps instead because they needed pilots and were willing to give him a shot. After leaving active duty, he built a career at enterprise-AI company C3, rising to general manager of its federal practice before leaving to start Noda. He frames himself first and foremost as “a Marine and patriot,” a self-description that shapes how he runs the company and what he’s willing to say in public.

About Paige Craig

Paige Craig is the founder and general partner of Outlander VC. Growing up homeless, and raised in what he describes as a violent world, he was named for a grandfather who rose from enlisted soldier to an officer under General Patton. Paige was recruited to West Point — where he claims the distinction of being the most-punished cadet in his class — and left in his third year, recognizing he was “the wrong guy” for the institution’s barracks mentality. He moved on to the Marine Corps and the intelligence community, and in 2003 built a private military company operating at and beyond the forward edge in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa, which he sold. As an investor, his entire lens is the founder and the mission, evaluated against a proprietary 38-point framework built around vision, intelligence, character, and execution.

About Noda AI

Noda AI is a startup building the orchestration and decision layer for autonomous warfare. Rather than building drones or vehicles, Noda aims to overlay government-designed tactics and strategy onto the autonomous platforms other companies are building. Their software seeks to re-create what a strike cell or operations center does today, fast enough to run in real time as robots take over more of the battlefield. The idea is that battle plays for defeating advanced threats need to be baked into deployable algorithms in advance, ready to push down to autonomous boats, planes, and submersibles the moment competition turns to conflict. The company started as a five-person team that prototyped for roughly a year unpaid, and is now working across what Phil will only describe as “very topical” combatant commands. Find them at NodaIntelligence.ai.

About Outlander VC

Outlander VC is an early-stage venture firm focused on writing first checks into exceptional, often low-signal founders others haven’t yet recognized. The firm runs a high-volume, high-selectivity funnel. Paige says that over 10,000 founders come in through the top of the funnel each year, with roughly 5,000 passing AI filters to a first call, a few hundred meeting the team in person, and 10 to 12 ultimately receiving funding. Paige keeps more than half his calendar deliberately unscheduled so he can take long walks with founders and go deep on the person rather than the pitch deck. The firm now has seven partners Craig has trained.

For more about…

* Noda AI: https://www.nodaintelligence.ai/

* Outlander VC: https://outlander.vc/

* Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Follow:

* Phil Duong: LinkedIn

* Paige Craig: X | LinkedIn

* Noah Sheinbaum: X | LinkedIn

When it comes to the defense tech sales G.O.A.T. debate, John Doyle is one of the most oft-mentioned names in the business. From his days at Palantir, to his robust advisory portfolio, John is both successful and generous.

His appearance on Crossing the Valley has been a long time coming!

This week, John joined us to talk about Cape — a privacy-first cellular carrier he started in 2022 after a decade at Palantir and a tour as a Green Beret communications leader.

The simple version of the story is “ex-Palantir guy builds secure phone company.”

The truth, of course, is a whole lot more interesting.

For more on…

Cape: https://www.cape.co/

John Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doyle-48633227/

Crossing the Valley: LinkedIn | YouTube

Noah Sheinbaum: LinkedIn | X

How Nominal Turned the Pentagon’s Slowest Gate Into a Growth Engine

Featuring Cameron McCord, CEO and co-founder of Nominal

About Cameron

Cameron McCord has seen the defense ecosystem from more seats than most. He started his career as a young submarine officer, operating, in his words, with “the best of 1980s technology” and learning what it feels like to be beholden to antiquated tech when the mission is on the line. He carried that frustration into operating roles at Anduril and Saildrone, where he watched fast-growing hardware companies scale and saw the same testing problem appear at every one of them. Then he went to Lux Capital, where he saw the same pain across a thousand more companies and turned a hunch into a thesis.

Today, that thesis is a company called Nominal, one of the fastest growing, well-capitalized, and highly touted defense tech companies in the industry.

About Nominal

Nominal is a software and data platform for hardware testing operations. The hardware test market is a bit anathema for us non-technical folks. But the reality is, anyone who builds anything in the real world, whether for a commercial market or the warfighter, has to test and validate it. Until recently, that was mostly done via spreadsheets, MATLAB scripts, and hard-to-reach data. Nominal took many of the processes that befuddle founders and seasoned executives alike, and automated them. The company was incubated at Lux Capital. They intended to serve both commercial and defense customers from day one. And they’ve been on a tear, recently announcing a sole-source $53 million IDIQ for the Air Force Test Center. Today, Nominal is active in the Navy at Pax River, developed partnerships with MIT, and has some exciting news with DARPA.

After speaking time with Cam, I left convinced that Nominal really is going after the single biggest (remaining) roadblock to meaningful acquisition reform. If we don’t solve test, we cannot meaningfully shrink the divide between cool ideas in R&D and capabilities that are validated and safe to deploy. If we’re entering a tech boom cycle (and if you’re even a slightly AI-pilled reader, it’s not hard to imagine that we are), then the need to quantify risk, readiness, and the value of a test (especially one you can skip) becomes a whole lot clearer. Cameron’s whole approach is a bet that the way across the valley of death is not to test less or test faster in a vacuum, but to finally be able to prove, with data, exactly how much testing is enough.

For more on Nominal: LinkedIn | Website | X

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com | YouTube

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How Machina Labs Compressed 4-Year Lead Times Into 1 Week

About Ed Mehr

Ed Mehr is the CEO and co-founder of Machina Labs. A builder since childhood (he attended a school that emphasized welding, carpentry, and craft) Ed started his career in software before crossing over into hardware as an early engineer at SpaceX in the early 2010s. The cultural shock of moving from “ship a prototype in days” software to “wait months for a single iteration” hardware became the founding wound that drove him toward agile manufacturing. After SpaceX, he joined Relativity Space to work on 3D-printed launch vehicles, then founded Machina Labs to build the missing infrastructure he believed was the real bottleneck to America’s next industrial age: a general-purpose manufacturing platform that didn’t require part-specific tooling or CapEx. He’s a self-described capitalist and car guy, and prints small batches of his own shirts when an idea strikes him. Kinda badass.

About Machina Labs

Machina Labs is building “RoboCraftsman.” These are autonomous robotic cells that form sheet metal parts the way a potter shapes clay. Two robots come at a flat sheet of metal from either side and progressively deform it into complex 3D geometries, eliminating the need for the dies, molds, and multi-story stamping presses that have defined sheet metal manufacturing for a century. The company serves a dual-use customer base spanning commercial (Toyota is both a major customer and an investor) and defense (Air Force depots, missile primes, NASA). Machina has already deployed production cells at Air Force depots, where they’re making C-130 panels and other legacy aircraft parts that previously required hunting down donor airframes in junkyards or waiting four years for new tooling. The company is roughly 70–80 people, hiring aggressively, and approaching the end of qualification testing with parts on track to fly soon. Machina is now entering its scale phase, and Ed teases that a missile-program prime announcement is imminent…

For more on Machina:

* Careers: machinalabs.ai/careers

* Follow Ed: X | LinkedIn

For more Crossing the Valley:

* Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

* Substack: valleycrossers.com

* YouTube: https://youtu.be/_WN-GJaCbGs

Rebuilding America’s Thermal Imaging Supply Chain

About John Hong and Tallis Chang

John Hong is CEO and Tallis Chang is COO of Obsidian Sensors. The two have worked together for over 40 years, with backgrounds in aerospace before joining Qualcomm. At Qualcomm, they were part of the team that spent nearly a decade developing low-power displays using MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) built on glass substrates. When Qualcomm decided the program no longer fit its core business, John and Tallis were given the runway to find a new application for the manufacturing know-how they had built. That pivot became Obsidian Sensors.

About Obsidian Sensors

Obsidian Sensors, headquartered in San Diego, manufactures microbolometers — the core sensor inside thermal imaging cameras — using a fundamentally different platform than the rest of the industry. Where incumbents builds them on silicon wafers, Obsidian builds these sensors on display glass, leveraging LCD fabrication infrastructure in Japan and Taiwan that already produces millions of phone and watch displays. This shift dramatically reduced unit cost while preserving sensor performance.

The company spun out of Qualcomm in 2017 with seed capital, transferred equipment, seven team members, and five patent applications. It initially targeted the automotive market before pivoting to defense after receiving a DIU OTA at the start of COVID. Today, Obsidian is a critical supplier of thermal cameras to the US drone ecosystem, with production scaling from 5,000 units in 2025 to a planned 1 million units per year by the end of 2026 at its Top Gun Street facility in San Diego. A Phase 2 facility targeting 10–20 million units annually is planned for 2028.

Follow John: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-h-973b372/

Follow Tallis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tallischang/

Learn more about Obsidian: https://www.obsidiansensors.com/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

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About Brian Spurlock

Brian Spurlock is VP of Growth and Strategy at Persistent Systems, and a self-described “boomerang” employee, meaning he’s had two separate tenures at the company. He came up as a Special Operations acquisitions officer at Fort Bragg, which means he’s seen the Persistent Systems story from both sides: as the government buyer evaluating the technology and as the company executive selling it. He left for a stint at AWS, returned, and is now the one figuring out how to bring tactical mesh networking from Special Operations into Army divisions. He is based in the Fort Bragg / Pinehurst area of North Carolina.

About Persistent Systems

Persistent Systems builds tactical mesh networking hardware and software: specifically, the Wave Relay and Cloud Relay systems, delivered on hardware called the MPU (currently MPU5, with MPU6 in development). The idea is simple and hard: create a mobile RF network that moves with operators, passes real data at real speeds, and requires zero thought from the person holding the radio. Founded in 2007 by two Johns Hopkins PhDs — Herb Rubens and Dave Holmer — the company has never taken outside capital. It manufactures in Manhattan. It has customers across U.S. Special Operations, conventional Army (currently scaling into division-level exercises with 4th Infantry Division), the Air Force, NATO allies, and public safety. It is on the verge of Army program-of-record status after nearly 20 years.

Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spurs/

For more Persistent Systems: https://persistentsystems.com/

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* YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@crossingthevalley