Prewitt Ridge

💡Thrilled to be included on Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas list for 2024! The list honors companies and organizations that are tackling some of our toughest challenges, and setting out to build products that improve the world. At Prewitt Ridge, we’re proud to deliver software that brings new levels of efficiency and collaboration to the engineering teams that are building world-changing technology, namely those designing and building complex hardware systems such as planes, satellites, and rockets. These teams are working on highly technical engineering projects, which require a multitude of tools for design and analysis. They rely on requirements to make those projects achievable, but these requirements and data are often siloed in these tools. At the same time, assessing the impact of any variation in those requirements on the whole system is a challenging and manual process that could result in mistakes, and those mistakes could bring delays, cost overruns, and even catastrophic system failures. Prewitt Ridge’s software helps engineers seamlessly access and distribute requirements across all of the toolsets that teams use. This boosts productivity, breaks down communication barriers, and ultimately speeds up system design timelines. In other words, it helps engineers move faster and break less along the way. Most importantly, this provides more space for the creativity that is necessary to build world-changing products. This recognition gives us more fuel to accelerate the development of high-impact hardware! Check out the full list at the link in the comments! #deeptech #engineering #hardware

Great night at the Vets in AI event at Hulu headquarters! I attended the event on behalf of Prewitt Ridge — great turnout of about 200 leaders in defense, space, media, and entertainment, as well as veterans seeking to transition into tech. Really enjoyed hearing about David Kervin's Journey to entrepreneurship from his career in the Marine Corps to starting Proteus Space, Inc. I'm excited to stay tuned for exciting launches to come from this company! Great hanging out with my BizVets LA team as well! Thanks to Katherine Webster and the VetsinTech team for organizing a great event! #defense #space #veterans

Last week was my first time in Austin, and Fed Supernova at the Capital Factory was a great introduction to the city! After hearing for years about 6th Street, the music scene, the barbecue scene, kolaches and the heat, I was lucky enough to experience all of the above in a whirlwind few days in Austin! From getting BBQ at Coopers and getting late night drinks in a parking garage to reconnecting with old friends like Aniza Brown 👩🏻💻🚀 and Oluseun Taiwo, it was a wonderful few days in the city. It was also incredible to see everything that Capital Factory and organizations like SpaceWERX and the Army Application Labs have built in Austin, and to experience the technology industry that is continuing to expand in the city! I'm looking forward to many more trips to Austin in the future, and will definitely be attending Fed Supernova again next year!

Meet the Prewitt Ridge team in Austin! Co-Founder Charles (Zeke) Brechtel will be attending Fed Supernova at the Capital Factory from August 20-22. Fed Supernova is a favorite event of the aerospace and defense innovation community. The event is centered around bringing entrepreneurs, VCs, government and industry together, with the specific goal of developing dual-use solutions that apply dual use technology to the DoD. When technologists can collaborate directly with the people who are closest to the problem, good things happen! We’re particularly excited to head to Austin, which has long had one of the most vibrant innovation communities in the country, buoyed recently by Tesla, SpaceX, and a host of government innovation units making a home inside Capital Factory. Can’t wait to see friends, including the Squadra Ventures team represented by Dan Madden and Dominic Ventimiglia, who will be hosting a happy hour on Thursday, August 22, at Zilker Brewing Company. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/ecBBM495 If you’ll be in Austin next week and want to discuss digital engineering, get in touch! #engineering #aerospace #defense

Great week in Utah! Prewitt Ridge CEO Steve Massey is in Logan for SmallSat, which continues to be one of the largest space industry events of the year! We were delighted to serve as a co-sponsor of the Payload Space Happy Hour. Both SmallSat and University Nanosatellite Program are some of the reasons our CEO Steve has his career. It was great to run into Dr. Michael Swartwout and attend the 25 year anniversary of UNP We’re longtime attendees of SmallSat, so this was an especially wonderful opportunity to reconnect with familiar faces, as well as meet new folks. These small group events continue to have a big impact on our ecosystem! We were thrilled to join forces with Bank of America, Millennium Space Systems, A Boeing Company, and Terran Orbital Corporation to bring the happy hour to life. This year’s SmallSat conference had a focus on automation — it’s being introduced in satellite systems, and in the engineering workflows that results in these systems being deployed. We’re proud to be a part of the community that is advancing capabilities as the industry grows across government and commercial applications, and salute the hard work of all those who bring us together! #aerospace #space #engineering

Congrats to our customers Hydrosat & Muon Space on a successful launch! #aerospace #space #deeptech

On my way to Detroit to support Prewitt Ridge and Primordial Labs at the National Defense Industrial Association - (NDIA) 2024 GVSETS. It will be a quick turn for me but hoping to connecting with friends at PEO Ground Combat Systems and meet new friends at U.S. Army PEO Combat Support & Combat Service Support. Steve Massey, Lee Ritholtz, and Kevin Cuomo are developing technology that will change the world—I'd love to tell you more about it! Friends, please find our Squadra Ventures team and say hi!

Our partners at Prewitt Ridge have some of the most impressive engineering thought leaders and practitioners out there, having developed their products and approach to hard problems by doing actual rocket science at SpaceX before stepping out as founders.

In the earliest stages, startups have to balance two needs: capital to build now, and the focus to create the product that will bring their vision to life. We experienced this journey at Prewitt Ridge, and I had the opportunity to share parts of our story last week at AIAA ASCEND, and I wanted to share some of the highlights here, as well as the video clip captured by my teammate York Zhang! Steve Massey and I incorporated Prewitt Ridge in Dec 2019 and hit the ground running in 2020. Building on our experience as engineers working at SpaceX and Slingshot Aerospace, we set out to take a picks-and-shovels approach to build digital engineering software tooling for engineers like us, who are working at the companies out there using the picks and shovels, here on Earth and soon in space. We quickly found that there were a host of resources available to us. We received initial funding through the SBIR/STTR program, an initiative from the US government to provide early-stage technology funding for small businesses. With two STTR awards and a great university partner at UNM, we began to execute on our product vision. Simultaneously, we received phenomenal support from the Techstars Space Accelerator program. This accelerator helped us focus on the tradeoffs of bootstrapped growth through SBIR/STTR vs traditional fundraising. SBIR/STTR are fantastic sources of capital, providing a partnership that helps small businesses build through non-dilutive funding. But it’s important to remember that these opportunities are focused on specific topics and non-recurring. As a business, it's important to be disciplined on aligning the SBIR/STTR opportunities with your core product features and strategies to ensure they don't impede your teams execution. We made the decision to balance both SBIR/STTR with growth via venture capital. We successfully raised a round of funding, led by Squadra Ventures with participation from Stage Venture Partners, Aurelia Foundry, Wonder Ventures, Haystack, Acequia Capital, Techstars and GC&H We’ve had a wonderful experience working with the VC community, highlighted by the hands-on approach and national security expertise of Squadra Ventures. Going forward, we’ll continue to consider both types of funding. These resources have provided numerous connections to government and industry leaders, and in turn they have helped to focus our tool offering and capabilities. Our journey shows the importance of another balance that startups must strike: reducing risk and optimizing opportunities. Thanks to Techstars, AIAA ASCEND and all of the panelists for a great conversation! If you’re interested in discussing solutions for digital engineering, get in touch! #startups #aerospace #AIAAASCEND