Glasgow once built a quarter of the world's ocean-going ships. Today it builds more spacecraft than anywhere else in Europe, and Alba Orbital is part of that shift, designing the smallest, cheapest satellites you can launch: sub-kilogram PocketQubes and the deployers that carry them to orbit.
Tom Walkinshaw tells the founder's story behind the company, from becoming one of the first businesses to bootstrap to orbit on sales and European Space Agency support, to launching from a remote peninsula in New Zealand with Rocket Lab, to becoming Scotland's first Y Combinator company and raising funding on the back of having actually flown hardware. The bigger ambition is audacious: image everywhere on Earth every fifteen minutes, roughly fifty times more often than today's state of the art, unlocking use cases like early wildfire detection, shipping and agriculture, all of which hinges on cracking mass production of satellites in Glasgow.
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I'm Tom Wilkinshaw, founder and CEO of Alborrato Inc. We were limited but we've had to reincorporate as an American company. So yeah, I've got to talk today about my story and journey so far with Alba and obviously as you tell I'm from Scotland.
And we're building satellites in Glasgow ultimately, so I'll talk a little bit about that. This is Glasgow for those of you who don't know what Glasgow is. I mean, as you can tell from this picture, it's one I took a while ago, you can see a big crane there.
It's largely been gentrified since the shipbuilding days. We used to build, I think it was about a quarter of the world's ocean going ships, and Glasgow is very famous for that but now in the twenty first century city has really changed and evolved and we actually built more spaceships in Glasgow than anywhere else in Europe and I think we're currently third globally behind Starlink in Seattle and San Francisco with Plant Labs.
Things are changing pretty quickly and we're sort of part of that revolution. So we kind of had two mission statements. We started off with the goal of advancing POL cubes. POC cubes are basically five cent mercubes satellites. They're very small satellites so they're essentially under one kilogram.
So these are the smallest cheapest satellites you can launch and we really wanted to be the sort of world leader in that and we can become the world leader in that sort of technology. We've launched more satellites, we've built more satellites than anybody else in the world and we have the most advanced technology, etc, etc.
And really from that we've really pivoted towards a mission of imaging everywhere on earth every fifteen minutes, which is really crazy ambitious. But with the breakthroughs we've in the technology and the fact that we're starting to deploy these satellites at scale, it really opens up some pretty unique opportunities to do really interesting things and see the earth in very interesting UEs.
So these were actually the first satellites we ever launched in space. They're very tiny so the two brown satellites are Hungarian satellites, they're a customer in Hungary so they're a technical university. The white one is a Spanish startup and the green one there is an American start up of amateur project thing.
These are all inside what we call our ALBOPODS. Essentially, ALBOPODS everything you need to build and operate spacecraft. So we actually build the satellites which are what we call unicorns. We design the deployers which is a sort of black box. There's a case there that goes on top of that and essentially it's a spring loaded jack in the box it's super lightweight, three d printed, it's really cool.
So this was the first floor we launched and we actually launched six from New Zealand at the end of twenty nineteen. These were the satellites that we built. So we do both what we call rideshare as one of our big markets. Basically we buy a bunch of kilograms and we sub sell some of that out to people who also build pocket tubes and we offer super low cost launches to orbit, actually cheapest in the world if you want to put something into space.
And we also design our own spacecraft called Unicorns. So these were two customers we built satellites for, so Unicorn 2B and 2C. I'll tell you a little bit about the story and they went inside that pod and that's the team outside the clean room with the satellites.
So there's only a few companies in the world that actually launch into orbit. One of them is SpaceX which I'll talk about in a second and there's also a company in New Zealand called Rocket Lab. So we've had a really close relationship with them.
They recently went public and a super successful company. This was actually down in New Zealand doing the integration. This table like thing is actually the third stage of their rocket. It's an electron launch vehicle, it's what it's called. It's one of the world's smallest operational launch vehicles.
And there's us inspecting the pod and installing things. We actually flew two pods on this launch and six satellites. That is actually out in New Zealand, this is our launch pad that's behind us, so that was some of the team we took down there.
Really far away from Scotland, it turns out. It's actually as far as you can pretty much go. So if you're looking for a long journey try and get to the Mahia Peninsula, it's really far away. Good for rockets though. Yeah, you can blow a lot of stuff up down there and no one really cares, so that's pretty cool.
It's important in rockets. So yeah, this is sort of the video of our sort of highlight reel I guess of the launch. So this is us in the hangar, doing integration. This big satellite sat on top of our little pods. This is the launch vehicle going vertical.
And actually we launched, it was I think eight in the morning our time, sorry twenty past eight our time, but it was actually like a night time lunch out in New Zealand, it was pretty cool. Eight, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
Sorry. Melt the speakers a little So this is actually our first ever launch to orbit. Like, getting to orbit is really hard. To get to orbit, have to go seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour, twenty five thousand kilometers per hour. There's a lot of energy involved, so it's actually really hard just to get anything on or convince people to let you fly stuff on these things.
You've got to jump through a lot of hoops, you've got to qualify your satellites, your systems have to work, you have to get approvals from virtually everyone, which is a total nightmare, but we thankfully got signed off from the DOD about a day or two before we launched, and NASA as well sort of approved and signed off things.
All in all pretty stressful but we successfully launched, left it off and yeah I was pretty stressed at this point watching this thing go up. We're really concerned about like just the pod. The pod has to work and we've done a lot of testing but you just never know these things you know.
There's like a lot of forces on the vehicle and things so yeah so it takes about nine minutes to get into orbit. This is sort of a sped up version so highly real but the big events are the first stage obviously mission left off and then you do what's called stage separation, first stage falls away.
And one of the cool things about the launch we were on was actually they're trying to be one of the first companies ever to reuse a booster. SpaceX have successfully done this, but Rocket Lab are trying to do that to and we're able to get it back through the atmosphere.
So yeah, so it took us about nine minutes to get into orbit. We were able to successfully deploy all the payloads, albeit we didn't get a video of that, but we can confirm not too long after that satellites were indeed off in space and they deployed pod work as expected.
So yeah, all in all that was pretty stressful and we actually became probably one of the first first ever company to bootstrap to Orbitz. We hadn't actually raised any external financing at this point. So being in Scotland and people who are Scottish founders will know that the investment scene in Scotland's bleak.
Bleak, so yeah. Is that fair? I don't know. Is that controversial? It kind of sucks, let's be honest. So we actually done it through sales and some ESA support, European Space Agency support. We became one of first companies ever to do that. So on the back of that, this alley you've seen before was the unicorns where we built them for a customer, which another startup in the US.
But you see there was no camera on that, so it was a telecoms mission. The idea was to test some radio tech. So I mean I can really think the big opportunity is imaging the earth. So we redesigned Unicorn. This is sort of the two point one version.
We're now on the two point two, but we haven't put anything out on that yet. But this is the two point one, so it's got a big lens right in the middle there. So we redesigned it all to take a big lens, really with the goal of imaging Earth and really imaging in unique ways because once humanit tries a platform then obviously flying these things and capturing data is the big opportunity.
On the back of the Rocket Lab launch we signed up for SpaceX launch. This time we had a much bigger cluster and this was supposed to launch actually last year. A number of things happened that delayed that and all of our satellites have been taken off of Falcon nine which was pretty heartbreaking.
So yeah, that's not fun. Wouldn't recommend yeah, anyway these are some satellites, this is Delfts, Dutch University satellite, TU Delft and Bundshammer satellites as well that we've built and launched for people. This is the pods, so these are slightly upgraded, beefed up versions for the Falcon nine flight.
What basically is happening with our launches, we're now doing I think I'll come on to that in second with the manifest but I think we have five pods launching in Falcon nine January, or tenth of January currently is the current schedule for that.
So they're shipping out in about two weeks. And we also have another launch on Rocket Labyrinth the same date. We're actually shipping out six pods with about nineteen satellites currently so the team's all pretty stressed. So that's a lot of fun to deal with.
That's what it is. Careful what you wish for. So yeah and for fun reasons it turns out like once we all talk about people took us more seriously. We managed to get in, so yeah. It's really like you know you're to convince people you know what you're talking about but actually doing it sure helps the argument.
We raised, we basically I think probably like tail end of last year we got accepted into Y Combinator which is quite a famous startup program, famous for startups like Airbnb and Dropbox and Coinbase I think is the new cool one that's on the scene.
But there's like a ton of you know super successful Y Combinator companies and we were the first Y Combinator company from Scotland. It was pretty cool and they actually done it virtually this year which makes life a lot easier for companies that aren't based in Silicon Valley.
So it's kind of cool that they took what we were doing seriously, wanted invest and we actually done really well in the programme. We were actually one of the top companies in our batch and there was something like sixteen thousand applications and I think about three fifty in the batch and the alumni demo day we were actually can't see exactly where we came but it was super super high.
We got a lot of interest at demo day which was wild and certainly at the Scottish startups that want to do this then I'd definitely recommend it. Certainly the cool thing about YC, not to go off a tangent YC, but certainly they've figured out the fundraising model for early stage companies for sure.
And it's a real market and the biggest thing I learned from it was just create options for yourself. There's a lot of people who are investing in tech out there and it is a real market whereas here it's very small numbers of people so it's really not quite the scale and they've really got the system down.
It's really good. So from that we were able to raise some money, three point five million from YC obviously and MetaPlanet which is a holding company for one of the Skype founders. So that's pretty cool. We ended up with about forty investors in the round but one of the more famous ones was James Park, who's the current founder and CEO of Fitbit, and has been actually super helpful helping us ramp production.
So that's the fundraising piece. So that's basically allowed us to be more aggressive in what we're doing, sort of giving me more confidence I guess in the sense that we can go and raise capital on really good terms and people really believe in the mission and what we're trying to do.
And if anything, we really stood out in the batch because we were like one of the only space companies in the batch that had actually flown stuff and actually we've launched more satellites than all the other Y Combinator companies combined and their combined space company market cap YAC companies is like on the order of like five, six billion so we've done that more than they had, which is pretty cool, pretty compelling argument I think for the round.
So yeah, in terms of the, we can call this the manifest, what we're up to. So the six we launched, they've actually all reentered now. They were in a very low orbit so those people who are concerned about space debris. Our satellites naturally decay and those were at very low orbit, about four hundred kilometer orbit which is super super low and they lasted between four and twelve months.
Typically it will be about three years but it's kind of in our interest to do this because we want to send up the new version much like you don't hold on to a phone for decades. It's the same thing with satellites. We're continually at the rate and improving the technology.
Each new version of Unicorn is substantially better than the previous version so we really don't want them up for too long but we want them up long enough that we can get some imagery done obviously and create a business case for more imagery.
We have four POCUPs going up on Electron. It was Q4, now just slipped into Q1 next year. And we're on the SpaceX Transporter three mission at Cape Canaveral and we've fifteen POCUs manifested on that launch. So yeah, hopefully January will be really busy for us we'll have hopefully about nineteen more satellites on orbit, gets about twenty five total.
We have another launch coming up which we haven't made too much noise about yet, but it's cluster five and that will be coming in April on another SpaceX radiators that will be transport four. So that's really a big challenge for us because we really need to ramp our production.
So historically we've done like one or two satellites, pods and things, but now we're really trying to move away from that kind of bespoke one off thing to basically doing production runs in batches and how do we do that quickly, efficiently and you know, yeah in a successful way.
And we have other clusters later next year as well so we're still trying to figure that out. So we have a few customers signed up on that and we'll probably do a bunch of unicorns probably late second half next year. To improve the quality control and things we've had to really invest in what we jokingly call the Alboplex.
It's basically a number of buildings we now have the centre of Glasgow. We've taken a railway arch for our environmental test house so we have this big shaker we bought from China. And basically that means we can shake the satellites in house. We've also just bought a vacuum chamber so we can actually do the vacuum testing in house and really what that allows us to do is build satellites incredibly quickly.
Satellites are one of those weird things that have never really been mass produced. It's only really Starlink probably in the last year or two that it's actually built more than like a thousand. So if you look at any other type of electronics, minimum runs from China if you're a startup is probably on the order of ten thousand units, something like that, if you're sort of doing a consumer batch run.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity to basically take all the breakthroughs from the other sectors, apply that to space and then ultimately sell access to a dataset, which VCs love datasets, that's a good buzzword. Certainly the goal, so this is sort of a mock up of what it might look like when we start to play at scale.
Really what we're trying to do is create like a real time earth fundamentally around ten year resolution. It's really hard because the earth's really big. So you need like a lot of satellites to make this happen and therefore the satellites have to be very small.
So it really sort of plays to our core strengths of like miniaturization and mass production and ultimately selling people access to see earth change real time. So our holy grail for us is every fifteen minutes. Our state of the art just now is once per day with a company called Planet Labs.
So this would be about fifty times more frequent than the state of the art, assuming we can get to scale. We're pushing super hard to make that happen. Use cases, everyone wants to know why. Why would you want to do that? For other than you can and it's cool, which isn't valid reasons according to venture capitalists.
The go to use case we use for this one is wildfire detection. Wildfires need no introduction, they're bad, they're big, they burn stuff down. You don't want to be near one when it's coming your way, but often you don't know where it's coming, know, so really being able to see things every fifteen minutes is a game changer.
Currently we have like weather satellites and they can do a fifty minute revisit but it's one kilometer per pixel so by the time the wildfire gets to a kilometer by kilometer you're toast. You really want to get there earlier and deal with it so that's a super compelling use case.
As you can see the ship stuff looks quite cool with the boats moving around but certainly there's a lot of shipping related use cases. One of our investors, a company called Flexport, a super successful Silicon Valley company who know do a lot of shipping and sort of freight management and things and being able to get better transportation logistics information is super important.
So things like agriculture, there's a lot of clouds in the world and unfortunately clouds ruin images from an EEO perspective so having a more frequent dataset allows you to better monitor farms and things like that. And there's a long, long list of things you can do with this but it's like you know that's just the sort of tip of the iceberg.
So yeah, so mass production is something I've talked about a little bit. We've really designed it to be mass produced and really the Unicorn two platform is really set up to be produced quite quickly. We have trays where we basically cut every part of the satellite.
So they're essentially internal kits that our tech team create and then ultimately we use that to build up the spacecrafts. And quite small, mean that's like three of them on a desk there. Currently I think in our clean room we have about seventeen spacecraft currently in some state of kitting or assembling.
And the room is fairly small, it's not like that big a room. So you can actually get pretty dense with these things. They're relatively small. The spacecraft, we're just under a kilogram. We're sort of widely known as the company with the most advanced technology in spacecraft under one kilogram.
So we're sort of positioned to round that up. Boeing's spacecraft's cool and sexy and everyone loves spacecraft and spaceships and things but there's a lot of kind of ground infrastructure that you can have to worry about which is maybe a little bit less glamorous but I I find it quite interesting as well.
Ultimately we've had to develop our own ground infrastructure, so these are ground stations. They're fully portable, you can take them wherever you want. They're built into a trailer, they have their own solar panels, they have their own power system, they have their own data backhaul.
It goes through the four gs, five gs network. It's essentially like it's a giant sally on the ground, self contained. And the first one's going out to Germany, so it's quite a cool shot. So you can see what's going on there. We have a two meter dash and that's how we get the images done, is through that dash and then there's a sort of Yagi antenna on the side there.
That's for sending commands. So these things sort of pivot back and forth when spacecraft are overhead and we use that to downlink the data images. So yeah, like I said before, lab facilities. So we actually have, we're very vertically integrated to ALPA, do pretty much everything in house largely because we have to because it's a brand new technology.
This is one of our engineers holding the sort of finished article. So you can see very big wings, a little camera in the center and pop out antennas and things like that. We basically developed an internal production line to help us mass produce these satellites.
So we've been investing super heavily in production, automation, all these sort of things and whatnot. And yeah, next goal is to get an image of Scotland from Orbit, not just Scotland, Scotland's cool and we're all pro Scotland's but we know a bunch of customers want to get their images as well.
So we started off with nighttime imagery. So that's something that we have a really unique USP. If you want buy nighttime imagery of anywhere on earth, it's actually kind of hard because the existing guys don't really want to do that. It's a pretty decent market to be fair, but no bigger than the daytime stuff, so we're starting off with nighttime.
We've, I think, signed up US government customers, commercial customers, there's a bunch of folks in different stages of negotiation there. Fundamentally, hopefully in January we'll have enough satellites out there to start getting useful imagery through the system. I think we have four imagers up in January and another nine in April, so about thirteen on the initial constellation before we start developing Unicorn three which will be our next generation satellite.
So yeah, if anybody's interested in building Unicorn three with us then get in touch. We're always looking for great people to get on board and help us grow and things like that. So if you're going to spend your life doing anything why not blow satellites, right?
So yeah, that's a sales pitch. And yeah, that's pretty much it. And yeah, thank you for your time and hospitality and yeah, just spread the word that like we both Sally's here and it's happening and you know it's not as kind of far off sci fi concept.
It's like you can come to Glasgow and see some hardware and stuff and yeah hopefully launch goes well. You never know. I mean what happened last time was actually hilarious. I mean we actually had nine satellites bowling in Falcon nine and then we got a call being like, Sally's been taken off and we're like, what?
But it turns out like our supplier had the Russian CEO and like the DOD didn't like that. So yeah, we kind of learned the hard way. So actually we were on Falcon nine, got involved in Heathen. So that's bit unfortunate. So that's the story there.
But yeah, thank you for your time and yeah, thanks.
