From SpaceX to $1B in 15 Months: Scott Morton’s Revel Story

[00:00] Aerospace, automotive, aviation, small modular reactor companies, chemical processing, anything where complex hardware systems are being developed. I think there's actually kind of a brain drain in this space. Like all these solutions were developed in the 80s and 90s and all the software engineers in the world got very excited about the internet. It's just like ancient tools. What if there was a company that could go and build something that's like three decades newer? At SpaceX, we ended up actually having to build all the infrastructure from scratch. You know, sitting on console, countdown clock is ticking down. If the software is a bottleneck, that is a problem. [00:30] you [00:40] Scott Morton, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you. Glad to be here. Well, I think we have a big congratulations to give you today. You recently just raised $150 million. [00:50] at a $1,005,000,000 valuation. Yes, yeah. Raised in this round $150 million. Total raised $180 million. 15-month-old company. [01:03] 15 months. Yes. [01:04] That's it. [01:05] - Yep, it's been, yeah, full afterburners, full, yeah, with the past, [01:11] year and a half. Who led it and what was the process like? You've only been around for 15 months. That's very fast. So yeah, this is Index Ventures leading this round. They kind of [01:20] came knocking and I got to know them the course of a few weeks. They came and actually saw a demo and loved what they saw. You know, I think overall, at least my philosophy on fundraising is we really want to have just a very high conviction team behind us.

[01:36] And I kind of also just don't want to kind of like [01:38] span this out over 10 years, I want to go, you know, full maximum speed to execute on our vision. Having high conviction, I think means coming out and like putting, you know, putting your name on the line. And that's kind of like what I think a preemptive round looks like on the investor side. [01:56] So kind of instead of doing a full process and you create this like competitive atmosphere where you may you might not actually get the highest conviction investor. I think I like this this form of fundraising. And then who did the seed and the Series A? Yeah. So the seed was, I would say, kind of a haphazard fundraise, to be honest with you. It was like I had, you know, I. [02:18] left SpaceX and had actually just gotten married and then I, and then I kicked off a fundraise. But yeah, Felice is an abstract, co-led that one. [02:26] And then it was May Thrive came in for a preemptive Series A, and then this one was actually [02:36] Index led Redpoint is also has a big participation in this one. Alex Bard at Redpoint. That's phenomenal. [02:44] I hope you know that. It's pretty incredible to be 15 months old. You were at SpaceX for nine years. Can you just talk more, go deeper into how this all works? [02:53] started and before we get too deep obviously I think the fundraising activity is super super exciting but we didn't talk about what Revel is so could you explain what Revel is and how you started this [03:04] So just real quick, Revel is a platform for

[03:08] controlling and testing hardware systems. And I think kind of going way back, I've, you know, I grew up building machines with my dad in the garage, could never actually kind of [03:18] write the or make them do anything. Fast forward into college, I was worked at a research lab in robotics. And then kind of similar story, I could like, I could design the whole the robot, I could even fabricate, I could machine it. But then I could not actually write the control software to go make it do what I wanted to do. So I ended up getting a, you know, getting a computer science master's, I was a mechanical undergrad. And then later at SpaceX, it was really interesting, [03:48] at a much larger scale. We needed to write a lot of control software for the launch site, for the rocket as well, [03:55] And there were all these kind of solutions that had been developed over the 80s and 90s, and some of them were in use at SpaceX, but they were three decades old at this point. [04:08] And overall, it's just like this space has just seen there's like I think there's actually kind of a brain drain in this space. Like all these solutions were developed in the 80s and 90s. And then I think all the software engineers in the world got very excited about like the Internet and worked on those problems. [04:23] And this kind of area kind of just fell by the wayside. And so at SpaceX, we ended up actually having to build all the infrastructure from scratch to actually have something that was modern and that also really helped us be more successful. Big companies that have been worked that... [04:37] material that kind of came together in the '80s and '90s, like LabVIEW or National Instruments is one of the big ones. They actually built a kind of graphical programming language back in 1986, and that's kind of the primary way that you would use their platform to write control software. And then the other big space, that's kind of in hardware tests, the other big market is industrial control systems. And it's actually this, it's like a very similar story. The kind of most modern tools were developed in, it's a language called structured text.

[05:07] invented in 1993, and that is still to this day like the cutting edge in that space. And so these two big markets have kind of evolved totally separately with very different solutions. It's all actually fundamentally the same problem. It's just how does software control physical systems [05:22] Do you have any idea how much time you save? [05:25] For your customers? Yeah. [05:27] Yeah, great question. So Impulse, the first big deployment was actually their rocket engine test site, which was like their kind of big burning need at the time. And the previous software, it was kind of one of the legacy solutions. [05:39] They were testing about once every other day, and we've gotten them to over multiple times per day, so over a 5x rate increase. They're able to, like, rip through engine test campaigns at a rate that's, like, yeah, 5 to 10x, what they used to be able to. And it also replaces multiple systems. Yeah, so there's kind of... [05:58] This one's a little harder to measure, but like how... [06:00] They at least report they're extremely happy with that. Like they have one platform that spans all these different systems. They can move engineers around. Another really big part of the platform [06:12] is that [06:13] Prior to Revel, normally these test systems mostly have to be built in-house. You're either going to use a legacy system that is super clunky and you have to have specialized engineers or you have to just fully build it yourself. [06:26] Our head of product is actually a former Palantir, Jess Wenzinger. She came out to really kind of figure out if she wanted to join Revel, and we took her to Impulse. [06:36] And before I could do anything, she like beeline, she saw someone using Revel, beeline it to, it was actually an intern.

[06:43] And I couldn't intervene. I was like, she just went directly to the source, and she started just asking him questions. He didn't know that we were from Rebel. And one of the awesome things that came out, she was like, yeah, I mean, basically in 15 minutes, I was able to get set up on Rebel. I was able to quickly learn how to write control software. And he was just... [07:03] you know, standing at one of their test platform or test systems and just [07:09] you know, just ripping on writing test software. And so I think that's really, you know, enabling engineers be much more self sufficient, you know, even like interns, it seems can get up to speed in a matter of minutes. [07:21] And that's a huge, huge unlock for impulse and and also just helping them move faster. Joined SpaceX back in 2015, worked on [07:29] a lot of the propellant load sequence for Falcon 9, which is, you know, I was like, [07:34] Prior to that, working on robots in a lab, very low consequence. You do something wrong, you just break your robot and you have to go fix it. But yeah, this was really my first experience with really high consequence control software. And it was an incredible experience. I mean, SpaceX just gives so much responsibility to the RE. I was like... [07:52] I think I'd been there for one year and I was designing like, [07:55] the control algorithm for how SpaceX accomplishes this new scheme. It's called load and go. It's how you and [08:01] It's like loading propellants in the vehicle at base of the last second because that enables it to be as cold as possible and then as dense as possible. So it's like a really... [08:10] kind of high stakes operation and like [08:13] The situation is really like if the valve...

[08:15] you know, when you're loading propellant, the valve stays open just a little too long. You like don't have a launch set anymore. And so that was really, and I think this is really where like giving an engineer that level of responsibility is. [08:26] is really how you sharpen the engineer. [08:30] You have to ace it absolutely for a shot. [08:34] And this is the situation. [08:36] I think that's my... [08:38] Going through that and thankfully it was all very successful, but I was like literally having to picture myself. I'm going to be on console. I'm going to be giving updates to launch director. This is like just a totally new system. No one even knew my name. The launch director did not know who I was. And it was like essentially how, you know, how we track propellant load and how we close that right on time. T minus two minutes. [09:00] Um, [09:01] And so that kind of set the stage for really understanding how this needed to be done. Looking forward into Starship... [09:06] we were really need to figure out like what do we want [09:10] for the long term at spacex t minus one minute [09:14] is where my heart rate would always like, oh, we looked after the operation, like, where did you kind of freak out? And at that moment, it was always for me, I was like, wow, I'm about to have tens of thousands of lines of code execute, one character wrong in one of these lines of code. [09:28] is the difference between total success [09:32] And then like, [09:33] maybe no more launch site. [09:34] Like and you always like we always like look back and like try to read these, you know, the textbook examples of like the N1 rockets from the Soviet era programs. And you read about how like all the failures and I honestly was thinking like, man,

[09:47] Like it's total success or this could go down in the history books is like, you know, there's a sophomore mistake that took out Starship in the launch pad. [09:54] It was really that scenario where you think about yourself in that situation and like what tools do you want? [10:00] to have that are going to help you be successful. And that's why we were really motivated to take and spend a lot of effort to go build totally new infrastructure. And I think it really, at least for me, it was like picturing myself in that situation and what tools do I want to have [10:15] that are going to maximize my chances of success. [10:18] Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. [10:48] powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMSS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid trust and use Brex.

[11:18] Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure frontier labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. [11:48] What's the biggest lesson you learned from Elon? Oh, man, I've so many stories. But actually, yeah, actually, there's a good one here. So I think what Elon's really good at is he's really tapped into asking engineers to go further than they otherwise would have. [12:05] And then there's like a very like one of the most interesting examples is like we [12:09] first orbital flight of Starship. [12:12] we had this maneuver to separate the booster from the ship. We call it the Twixnap. And it's where they just would kind of like, there's like a, [12:20] it would kind of [12:21] It essentially looked like a twig snap in space. [12:24] And it was a very not efficient way to do it. [12:27] And he for flight, the next flight, he was like, we're going to do hot staging, which is where you literally start the Starship engines while it's still connected to booster and just blast the booster. [12:39] And coming out of like, we all thought like, OK, cool, we're going to like do the same exact con ops. [12:44] Conceptual operations for the next flight of course like we're just gonna go nail it this time, right? Like no, we're gonna go do hot staging on the next flight and it was like I was I was actually like sitting outside of the I wasn't in this email meeting, but I was outside I saw everyone walk out and they were all just like Oh my god, like how are we gonna do this and then like that week like I

[13:04] like CAD screenshots getting started getting like shot around and people like, you know, I'm sure everyone was like, Oh, this is going to be really difficult. And then throughout the course of the week, some really awesome ideas started coming up. And then it started to look more and more feasible. And then they're like, how would you manufacture this? And how would you know, how would this all go together? And they ended up inventing like, just out of nowhere, a new stage that would sit between the booster and the ship. [13:28] called the hot stage that would just take the blast and then that would get ejected on re-entry for booster and it worked first shot that's insane and we were all i just remember the vibes at spaces were just like oh my like how and how in the hell are we going to go do this but i think the big [13:45] I've also pulled forward to Revel is that [13:48] When engineers come to you and say, hey, this is just like, we can't get this to work, this is just not possible, I think pushing them to just [13:56] say like, well, why don't you spend two more days thinking about it? And let's see what comes up. And if nothing, you know, we'll think about it then. But I think engineers really underestimate like, [14:06] their ability to like [14:10] creatively problem solve and just come up with new ideas that they otherwise never would have thought of like when they're like kind of presenting on what they think is possible in the moment and this is i was like i'll say like okay they're like this is like this is just not working we don't think this is a pathway okay let's spend one more day and then we're going to [14:25] like thinking about it and oftentimes will be like some breakthrough that no one kind of [14:29] saw coming. [14:31] I don't know how someone hasn't made a movie about this. There's just so many stories. I wish. I mean, early Starship was like Hopper days.

[14:39] It was like literally... [14:41] episode of The Office [14:48] And actually honestly this is like a good like another big I think I [14:51] for me, realization of that really carried forward into Revel was like, at that time, it was a really small team, actually, for Starship. It was like, I was like the software guy down in Boca Chica, Texas, you know, known as Starbase. And there were like a number of other key hardware engineers. But the awesome thing is like, we were, you know, as this tiny team, we were able to make decisions super quickly and just like, [15:13] you know, make a decision and that was it. There wasn't this like big review process, but what was really awesome is we were able to like, the tool, it was like tiny team, but we had the tools of SpaceX. And we also had this, all this awesome new infrastructure. [15:24] But seeing how fast a team could move [15:27] like a tiny team like that can move with awesome tools is another big inspiration behind Revel. And like that's, you know, what if we could like [15:34] similarly build these awesome tools and just make them available to all these teams, you know, startups, as well as like, you know, teams inside big companies that are trying to move fast. Do you want to keep Rebel small? How big do you want to scale the team here? You know, I think we'll scale as big as we need to to complete the mission. [15:51] Okay, fair answer. Yeah. We've been kind of honestly trying to work with like the best startups are definitely, and like I'd say more scaling startups are definitely really fast to adopt. Once they're convinced, it's like, [16:03] You know, that's it. [16:04] And so we've tried to work with, like, the best scaling startup in each space. So Impulse and K2 Space are awesome in satellites. I think Radiant is doing really well on small modular reactors. Astromechanica is another one. We're doing their jet engine test facility. And so I think it's, like, balancing working with companies. Like, I almost feel like we're, like, mini VCs. We have to, like, we have to think about, like, is this team moving really fast? Is this, you know, a company...

[16:32] that we really want to [16:34] invest in ourselves. Yeah, so definitely like for us, you know, we're looking at, you know, working with the best teams that are really taking it seriously to move fast, because I think that's where we can provide the most value as well as if they're trying to move fast, like, all right, that's what our platform does. If you could pick [16:47] anybody to be a customer [16:50] Who would you pick? [16:52] Could be multiple people. [16:54] we're in LA you have to man F us we're actually we're talking to a wastewater treatment company now it's been an interesting I don't know if we talked about this but there's like you know there's we actually have kind of soft launched another product so we have Revel Test which is focused on test systems and those span the different kind of verticals [17:12] you know, automotive, any kind of automotive, aerospace, aviation, defense, and there's like industrial control. [17:18] And that's what we have. Our platform actually looks very similar, except for like the software is very similar, but the actual hardware [17:25] and how we deploy in the architecture is quite different. That's actually what Radiant is using is we call it Revel C2, which is C2 stands for command and control. And so it does things like high availability, where we have primary backup systems, we have data logging redundancy as well. And we also have, we call it repeater, which is where you have another system back kind of at HQ. If you know, if you have like, [17:49] I'm sure when Radiant goes critical, they're going to have a lot of people wanting to watch that live just like SpaceX does. And you don't want to have all that load go on to the system that is used for control. [18:01] So we have this system that enables many people to then access it that is not going to

[18:05] put the control system at risk. So in terms of like dream customers, I think, I also think, I think Exxon would be awesome. I think helping an energy, the energy space, [18:15] and specifically in industrial control systems. [18:19] Good answer. Okay. [18:21] Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. [18:51] Why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S&P 500. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery, paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in the description. [19:21] Founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deel.com slash sorcery. That's deel.com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y.

[19:37] So as we close out, [19:39] I love to ask this question for one of our sponsors. It's Brex. They're all about spending smarter, moving faster. All about performance. The intelligent AF finance platform. Okay. [19:50] Do you remember that? I think so. You're down. Okay. So one thing that I think is so important for performance is who you surround yourself with. And so who are some people or maybe one person that you admire? [20:04] or [20:05] people in your network that you keep close to keep you motivated. So Dylan Field is actually a pretty... [20:12] big investor in Revel, and it's been super interesting. I think what they did to design, like design is everyone's business, what they did [20:20] for that space is actually a really good analog for what we're doing in these hardware control systems where we're really lowering the barrage entry to [20:31] for engineers, but enabling any engineer to go in and set up one of these systems, build control interfaces, write the code themselves, and just be fully self-sufficient. So it's been really interesting talking with Dylan Field about, you know, kind of our strategy and like, what are the key things to pay attention to and how we know how we think about how [20:49] the product. Amazing. Good answer. I was not expecting that. [20:54] Dylan's awesome. Yeah, he is awesome. What are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months? We have so many pilots that have stacked up. And I am like just... [21:03] Every pilot is actually converted. [21:05] We bet 1,000 so far. [21:07] Wow. Yeah, we do.

[21:09] Is that why you have a billion and five million valuations? Might have something to do with that. Yeah, I mean, we... [21:16] It was pretty interesting from index. They shared some of the background research and it was all I was like, I had to share the team. I was like, really? Yeah. I mean. [21:23] So far, it seems like everyone loves what we built. We kind of also go ask them to grade us. There's actually this the engineer at Astro Mechanica is this guy named Matt Perkins. [21:33] And he was actually with me early Starship. He was so soon I was like the software guy. He was the avionics lead. [21:39] And I asked him, "Hey, so how do you think [21:42] we're doing like what what do you think so far it was pretty it was actually pretty early this was like maybe five months ago he's like i give you guys an a-minus [21:49] And I was like, no way. Like, we got an A- from Matt Perkins. And I took that around. I was like, then I went to other engineers, and I was like, Matt Perkins gave us an A-. And that's like, I mean, Matt giving you an A- is like, [22:00] Incredible. [22:01] So that was pretty sweet. And he, you know, he's definitely not one to, you know, give out compliments. He's like he he's has a very high bar. So that was pretty sweet. OK, sounds like we got a hit in a plus this year. Yes, we are. I think I mean, the platforms come a long way since then, too. So I think we'll have to ask him again. [22:18] Fantastic. Thank you so much, Scott, and congratulations. Thank you. This was awesome. [22:23] Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.