#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Marshall Culpepper, Co-Founder and CEO, Kubos
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Open Source Software for Satellites
Move over, Houston. Another Texas city is making waves in space. Kubos is bringing outer space down to earth in Denton, Texas with open source software solutions for satellite mission control. We spoke with Kubos’ CEO and co-founder, Marshall Culpepper, to get some insight into his exciting company and the Denton startup ecosystem.
Can you start by telling us about Kubos and the work you do?
We are a satellite software company providing off-the-shelf software solutions for satellite missions. Most of our customers are commercial constellation companies, governments, space agencies, and military missions. We have about twenty-one satellites right now using our software. Spacecraft have gotten cheaper because of the arms and mobile tech races that have enabled new applications with smaller processors that use less power. Because of that, we are positioning ourselves to be the first fully native end-to-end software company to the space industry.
What is your background, and how did you get involved in this project?
I’ve been working on software platforms and tech startups for the majority of my career and writing software for about 20 years. I’ve been at the helm of several large projects and companies, as well as an early employee at companies like Mozilla. About 8 years ago, I got the space bug pretty bad when my wife bought me a telescope for my 30th birthday, and I could see space with my own eyes. I had to stop everything I was doing and figure out a way to use my skills in this industry.
I found a startup that was hiring and became the first employee for this company that was trying to put CubeSats into space. I wrote the flight software, the ground software, and built the team. In less than a year, we had three CubeSats launched from the International Space Station. I like to say that once you go to space, you can’t go back. When that company decided to pivot, I realized there was an opportunity to use my software skills more broadly and bring a comprehensive software platform to the space industry. My unique blend of experiences was around the intersection of commercial open source and big software platforms and space. I found two co-founders who compliment me well, and we’re up to about ten people now.
Why did you choose to build your company in Denton, TX?
I’ve been involved in building the startup community in Denton for the better part of 10 years now. I have been in startups for a long time and started building teams in Denton for remote Silicon Valley-style companies. As a big community builder and believer, I decided to try and lead by example by putting down roots and trying to build up the ecosystem with one of the first major startups in the city.
The reason I’m here is because the cost of living is great, and there are a ton of smart people doing incredible things. We partnered with University of North Texas early on to get some computer science students and faculty involved, and we also work with University of Texas at Dallas. Having these two major engineering hubs near us has been great. We’ve had some really passionately involved students, which is impressive because UNT doesn’t even have an aerospace engineering program.
What are your thoughts on the growing concern with “space junk”?
Lukilly, since we are a software vendor, we don’t have to develop a deorbit plan because most of our customers do that kind of thing. We have been working with them on creating no new space debris. In fact, one of the newest features of our product is the ability to monitor space debris and know when a potential collision event might occur between space debris and an active spacecraft.
From a market standpoint, there’s a ton of awareness in the space industry, so everyone is working as hard as they can to mitigate it. Also, we are sort of on the front lines with the FCC and others to advocate that new spacecraft going up must have a deorbit plan that includes burn up in the atmosphere, so that we are not leaving behind spacecraft to wither and decay and create more space debris.
Can you tell us about your open source business model?
Open source is very intentionally one of the core parts of our business. Most of the companies and startups I’ve worked for have had an open source value statement. What that boils down to is the belief that open source is the best way to innovate. It has been proven now that you can build a very sustainable business based on open source technology. I think we are just the first ones to do it in the space industry.
What are some policy concerns you have?
The most pertinent thing I’ve been keeping my eye on locally is that in Texas, cities are only allowed to raise taxes in very specific ways and by very small caps. Major cities are stuck with making binary decisions of where to put tax dollars between choices that could be complementary causes. For example, in Frisco, they raised their sales tax to the cap, which I think is 2 percent. They could have used the revenue from that tax increase to fund public transportation, but they used it instead to fund economic development in the city. That may seem short-sighted, but those two things actually go really well together. To build a thriving urban center, mobility and economic investment are both really important. I work a lot with the city of Denton on economic development to try and raise their budget and help them recruit tech companies to grow the city.
On a business level, the biggest regulatory concern for us is how much paperwork needs to be done for every satellite customer we have. It really drags down the development process of new missions quite a lot. From a product standpoint, we would love if our customers could just log into our software and start operating their mission right away, but that’s just not technically feasible in the current regulatory environment. We’ve been advocating for streamlined and automated regulation checkpoints, so our software can have a much higher level of user experience, and we can get them online faster.
What is you perspective on the overall health of the startup ecosystem?
We’ve grown several creative tech companies and educational programs in the past couple of years in Denton. The city has put some money behind the Stoke co-working space and entrepreneurial center in the downtown area. These are some real milestones for Denton.
On the national stage, Denton is probably going to get involved long term in the creative and education technology fields because the city is so well suited for those industries. I think there’s a lot of potential in Denton right now and in the whole Dallas–Fort Worth area. I would say the DFW startup scene has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last 5 to 10 years. Some really great companies are being started here, including space companies like ours. There’s a lot of capital that originally went to traditional investments like real estate that we are now seeing flow directly to venture capital for startups.
Also, it seems that Silicon Valley is starting to disaggregate quite a bit and a lot of tech companies are moving out of that area because of the cost of living. That’s a really good thing for other areas like DFW, where the cost of living is lower, and there is a lot of technical talent.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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