A Greater Cincinnati startup building a hypersonic space plane has landed a spot in a prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator that’s graduated companies like DoorDash, Uber, Dropbox and Airbnb.
Velontra, an aerospace startup based at Lebanon’s Warren County Airport, has been picked for Y Combinator’s latest batch, or cohort. The program is considered among the most coveted accelerators for startups; traditionally, only 1.5%-2% of applicants are selected.
Velontra CEO Rob Keane III told me this was the company’s second attempt at Y Combinator. It received some “hard-to-hear but excellent feedback” last year, he said, and has worked to further refine its customer base.
While Y Combinator has accepted startups spanning fintech, app creation, e-commerce and consumer health, it has fewer participants in the space, defense and aeronautical arenas, Keane said.
“Some people think going faster than five times the speed of sound is just something Tom Cruise dreamed about in 'Top Gun: Maverick.' But at Velontra, we are doing it,” Keane said in a release. “The goal of Y Combinator is to help startups take off. In Velontra’s case, literally.”
The veteran-owned company was founded in January 2021 to create the latest unmanned hypersonic technology to help “propel” the U.S. past its competitors in the sector — namely China and Russia. Velontra’s team was “discouraged by the slow pace and high cost” of innovation stemming from other American companies, Keane said.
Its hypersonic space plane will be able to take off from anywhere in any weather — powered by a jet engine with an afterburner — with the ability to climb to more than 100,000 feet and reach Mach 5 speeds, or five times the speed of sound.
The technology has multiple applications. One in particular is “low Earth orbit” access, or the nearest orbit to the surface of the Earth, where Elon Musk-led SpaceX is sending up Starlink satellites by the thousands.
Velontra said it can create more powerful and efficient engines at a lower cost. In terms of development, the team is starting with the plane’s propulsion system.
“We’re leaning into propulsion first because that's what we know,” Keane said.
Besides Keane, a former GE Aviation engineer and Force Recon Marine, Velontra’s other co-founder includes CTO Joel Darin, another GE Aviation alum and employee No. 1 at Atlanta-based hypersonic aircraft startup Hermeus. Its President Craig Wheldon is a retired U.S. Army major general. The company also recently added Nancy Currie-Gregg, a retired U.S. Army colonel, master Army aviator and four-time space shuttle astronaut, to its board.
The company has millions in current government/commercial contracts and letters of intent and has raised more than $1 million in pre-seed funding and is planning to finalize a seed round through the Y Combinator program.
The three-month cohort, currently underway, provides monetary assistance — it invests $500,000 in every company in two separate “safes” — as well as lessons on fundraising and more.
The program wraps with a virtual demo day Sept. 7-8 where founders present their companies to investors and press.
Since 2005, Y Combinator, based in Mountain View, Calif., has funded more than 3,500 startups, and its companies have a combined valuation nearing $1 trillion.
Velontra is the second Cincinnati-born startup tapped for the program since 2021. Resquared, which is building a software platform that helps shopping center owners and commercial real estate brokers fill vacancies with small businesses, participated in Y Combinator's program early last year.
The company has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco.
Keane said a similar move to Silicon Valley is not likely for Velontra, but states like Texas and Florida appear more competitive when it comes to incentives, tax breaks and matching funding. He said it’s likely the company could expand to either of those locations at a later date when it gets to the flight-testing stage.
Keane said Ohio’s available talent pool — its proximity to GE Aviation and its suppliers, as well as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — is key. Being able to tap into the state’s aviation history is also a major play. Its home base at the Warren County Airport, for one, puts it only miles from where the Wright Brothers developed their airplane.
“It’s the birthplace of aviation. It really feels like a sweet spot,” he said.
