00:00 Ashley
Epsilon 3 is an operations platform for aerospace and defense, industries where errors, delays, or data losses are not an option. The company was founded by engineers from NASA, NYSE-listed Northrop Grumman, and Global X, NYSE 100 ETF components Google and SpaceX. Joining me now is Laura Crabtree, Epsilon 3’s co-founder and CEO. Laura, welcome.
00:30 Laura Crabtree
Hi, thanks so much for having me, Ashley.
00:32 Ashley
All right, so tell me about this platform. What are the use cases for it?
00:35 Laura Crabtree
So, many of our customers use Epsilon 3 for building, integrating, and testing complex hardware. So, aerospace and defense is a growing industry. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen a boom in this industry and people need bespoke hardware to test and operate faster and more efficiently and safe safely. Um and that that’s really important as we grow in this industry. So we’ve seen that people really love having something that is bespoke to them.
01:05 Ashley
And I understand you spent a decade at SpaceX. What were the biggest industry-wide software-related challenges that you encountered there?
01:13 Laura Crabtree
So, at at SpaceX, we built a lot of internal tools. Outside of SpaceX, nobody has the tools that they need to be able to move quickly. So when you’re making decisions, you want to communicate with other engineers, you want to make sure that you’re testing the right hardware or that you’re running the test the same way as the person did yesterday. These are challenges that everyone in the industry has and we’re solving those challenges for them.
01:40 Ashley
And how did you go from identifying that problem to launching Epsilon 3?
01:46 Laura Crabtree
So, I saw the problem firsthand while I was at Northrop and at SpaceX and we solved it differently in both. And then when I left SpaceX in 2020, I decided to sort of branch out and figure out what problems people were having in the industry. And the more people I talked to, the more I heard the same story, which is, I need software to help me move more quickly. You’ve seen a lot of startups come out of the space industry. You’ve seen a lot of startups come out of even SpaceX.
02:08 Laura Crabtree
Those startups have 20, 30 people. They don’t have 120,000 people that Northrop has. So they need to be able to do the same amount with less people and the software layer helps them do that.
02:16 Ashley
What feedback do you get from customers?
02:18 Laura Crabtree
Well, we get feedback every day, uh all day, every day, and and actually we love that feedback. It helps make our platform stronger. Um our feedback from the customers is, you know, we we love what you’re doing and we want more, which is why we’ve branched out from our initial offering, which was just um on the testing and operation side and why we have branched out into a lot of different other pieces of the platform, um because our customers have asked us for a lot more and we continue to build for them and and we love hearing from them.
02:50 Ashley
Who is using Epsilon 3 today and what kind of growth have you seen?
02:56 Laura Crabtree
So we really started focusing on the space industry in 2020 and 2021, but what we did was we branched out from there to aerospace, to robotics, to energy. So customers will span from NASA, Blue Origin and Firefly all in the space industry to people like Commonwealth Fusion who are building nuclear reactors and or other um very, very complex hardware in the energy space. Um so pretty much spanning lots of different industries, all very complex must work scenarios. I mean you can imagine all of those scenarios, you you can’t have any room for failure.
03:26 Ashley
What will growth look like moving forward?
03:29 Laura Crabtree
So right now we’re we have focused the last couple of years on what does our customer do in their own company. And what we’re focusing on now is all of the suppliers, all of the people that they’re selling to, how do they communicate what they’re doing with their hardware and we’re focusing on how do we build the the economy of the industry because right now a lot of people silo their information in their own companies and we want to be able to share that information freely, whatever you need and want to share, while making sure that the things that you um need to keep in house are are staying secure in your own facility. So, kind of building the the network effect of the industry.
04:09 Ashley
We just have a few seconds left, but you started in space. Now you’re walking working across defense and advanced manufacturing. What do those industries have in common?
04:16 Laura Crabtree
So they they all have complexity, they all have very technical teams that want the information about their hardware and about their operations very quickly and efficiently. So we see very, very similar operations across all of the different verticals that we work in. And it’s something that we thought about from the beginning, but not something that we knew and now we’re learning a lot more about it.
04:36 Ashley
Laura Crabtree from Epsilon 3. Thank you so much for joining us at the New York Stock Exchange.
04:41 Laura Crabtree
Thank you so much for having me.
