The following interview is a conversation we had with Brad Bode, Founder CTO & CIO of ATLAS Space Operations, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $37 Million Raised to Pioneer the Ground Software as a Service Category
Brett
Hey, everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Brad Bode, founding CTO and CIO of Atlas Space Operations, a ground software as a service platform that’s raised over 37 million in funding. Brad, how are you?
Brad Bode
I’m great. And how are you?
Brett
I’m doing great. I’m super excited to jump in. This is a little bit different from the kind of SaaS interviews that we’re used to doing a lot of here. So really looking forward to this one. And I’d love to begin with a quick summary of what the company does.
Brad Bode
Yeah, that’s a great question, because what we are is a ground software as a service company. Now, that term is something we created later. Prior to this, it was ground station as a service. And then prior to that, there was really no term for what we did. There existed something in the marketplace where you would supply antenna infrastructure to people or companies that own satellites or the government that needed to get their data from space. So there existed these companies, but most of them were foreign. I think all of them were foreign at the time. It was around 2015, and you would lease time on those antennas, you would put your own hardware at those antennas, and it cost you a lot of money and a lot of time to integrate.
Brad Bode
And you would use RF communication to get your data from your satellite in space to earth. So that’s the primary impetus of where this occurred. And it didn’t have a name at that time, but when we started moving forward, we looked at and said, well, what are we really doing here? We’re providing a service. So at that point, there was no ground station as a service term. Somewhere along the line, I think it was around 2017, that name started to be applied. Ground station as a service, because you’re getting a station to get your data from space. Right. And were accredited as being a pioneer in that area. Right. Then we looked at it and we said, we’re really not just a station that implied infrastructure as a service.
Brad Bode
And we know there’s a difference between infrastructure as a service and software as a service. And we felt like were not doing ourselves, you know, marketing the proper service to say that were just station, ground station as a service. And then we looked at it and said, well, we’re really SaaS provider, but what are we providing? Ground software. So ground usually refers to the stuff on earth that helps you talk to your satellite. Thus ground S, a, a s ground software as a service. Because we do more than just give you access to infrastructure. We actually do a lot of coordination of all the equipment involved. We tie it all into the cloud.
Brad Bode
We provide layers of software on top of just that infrastructure that makes it more reliable, more secure, and provides a lot of the additional services that most satellite owners, operators would need to build anyway. So that sum it up in the simplest way I can really, as we walk it forward from the history of where this came from, what caught your.
Brett
Attention in 2015 when you joined, you know, what was it about this opportunity and this team that made you say, yep, that’s it, let’s go?
Brad Bode
Oh, good question. Well, first you have to kind of walk back. I did 12 years at a company that was TRW, then Northrop Grumman. These are big aerospace companies. TRW was bought by Northrop Grumman. And I did a lot of R and D in that area. So I was constantly on the bleeding edge of technology, trying to take that technology and transition it to actual programs of record in the government. And that was a lot of fun. So I got to experiment, but I also got to see software get used in the real world, or at least in the governmental real world. And at some point I became frustrated with the pace at which they were adopting technology, how they would be using very old technology.
Brad Bode
I saw Amazon Web Services take off because this, you know, I’m talking 2000 when I first started the Amazon took off. The shape of how you accessed information or you created applications was very much changing. So by 2012, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to be stuck in this routine of government work that while was a great job, great people, it just didn’t feel like I was pushing the boundaries of what was possible anymore. And I had learned enough. So I decided to look for other opportunities. I almost joined the FBI at one point. I got invited to a class and I turned that down primarily because of money. And then my one friend said, hey, come help me with this business. We want to have a software product. And so I did.
Brad Bode
I quit my job and I started building this Software tools that monitored things like the slopes in a mine, copper mine, gold mines, oil pipelines. And then we leveraged it to get a contract with the Department of Energy to monitor the US Oil reserves. And I did that for a little while, got that kicked off, and I didn’t own any of that business. And I said, well, I’d really like to know what it’s like to own a business or to start one myself. And at that time, one of my former colleagues from Northrop Grumman was looking to start a business. He’s a serial entrepreneur, I guess you could say. And we had met working on a program where he used some of my software that I wrote at Northrop Grumman. And so he said, well, what about this?
Brad Bode
And that was, you know, offering satellite communication services to the government or commercial satellite operators, owners. And it just felt like the right thing to do because my background to a large degree was in that from aerospace. And I also knew that this was ripe for disruption because of the current state of how the government uses antenna systems. Within the government, they weren’t even using external or commercial antenna systems almost ever. Everything was bespoke. They would put up a new antenna for a satellite program. They would put a bunch of hardware, ship it across the globe. You know, let’s say there were 10 antenna locations. They would take a stack of hardware and ship it to each location, plug it in, and then you’d have to manage all the VPN connections, the tunnels, the IP routing.
Brad Bode
All of that stuff had to be managed by the government or the satellite operator themselves. And it just seemed like a really good opportunity to make that all happen through the cloud. And at that time, the cloud was ready, you know, 2015, 2014. The cloud was clearly on its way and doing very well.
Brett
How long from when this was getting started in 2015 until you started generating revenue? I can’t imagine that it’s a easy business to bring to market or easy product to bring to market.
Brad Bode
No, it is not. It was not an easy business to bring to market. I think it took us, I started coding proof of concepts. You know, weren’t getting paid or anything. It was very much a bootstrapped business. My partner, Sean McDaniel, he was very good with government contracts and understood how government contracts work. So what he was on the lookout for while I was coding and I was able to just be heads down coding, he was on the lookout for contracts that would allow us to buy antenna for a government agency and put it somewhere for them. So we assembled A team of people who just wanted to do something different. Some people that were retired from the Air Force who knew the RF communication and knew a lot about antenna systems and software developers like me.
Brad Bode
And then I, you know, pulled in some software developer friends who I’d known to do small pieces of work that we did pay them for, but I never got paid. So I think it was about a year and a half to two years, you know, the first year of which there wasn’t a ton of. I mean, it was mostly just coding in that first year, but it wasn’t, you know, 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week. It was when we could fit it in. So I did some, you know, side work in that time period as well. I was part of 10x management as a consulting firm, like a high end consulting firm. And I would go and fix bad projects, which was kind of nice too. You learn a lot by doing that.
Brad Bode
So we bootstrapped it and I think it was about two years. And then we signed noaa, which is the National Oceanographic Agency. They do weather prediction models for distributed across the globe. Data comes from all sorts of different locations. But primarily these satellites that they have, they need constant information from. And we won that contract to put antenna in Ghana, Western Africa. In Ghana. And once we won that, you know, it was really off to the races because now we had to prove that the software worked, which we did, and we had to refine it and we had to make it better. So once we got that first contract, we had some legitimacy because the government putting their weight behind something is usually a very good thing, and it’s a good sign. And then we had to look for additional customers.
Brad Bode
But it’s important to note that there’s not a lot of satellites, particularly at that time, there wasn’t a lot of satellites that needed this service per se. We were banking on the fact that the growth of the satellite industry would come, and it did. I think everybody’s aware of how much it has at this point, but it did take a while.
Brett
Was that obvious at that time that it was going to keep growing? Like, did everyone agree it was just a matter of how big it could get, or were there some that weren’t as bullish, that it was going to become massive or keep growing?
Brad Bode
I should say no, I think everybody agreed that it was going to keep growing. SpaceX put a lot of attention on space at that time. And we had venture capital companies that were expressing a lot of interest in starting a space portfolio, you know, 20, 16, 17, 18. But most of the time they were interested investing in the satellites, which was always very interesting to me because the satellites are about data, you know, collection, right? They collect some kind of data, they have to get it back to Earth and then they have to process it. So, you know, there’s a lot of value in data, but everything had to get back to Earth. And everyone had used the same method, which was antennas, that they used RF communication to send it back to Earth.
Brad Bode
So I wasn’t sure why there wasn’t someone jumping on saying, hey look, you guys want the data pipeline, you want to own the data pipeline from space? I see it, let’s invest. Like there was no large company that did that. Our first earliest investor was a guy named Casey Cowell who started US Robotics and sold it for a very large amount in 2001, I think multi billions believe it was seven. And he saw that there was an opportunity there. And then he was one of our earliest investors that jumped. But everyone agreed that space was going to grow. It was unclear as to the pace. I think in the early days, the industry reports, which were very few, had a hard time estimating what it would actually be in three, four or five years.
Brad Bode
But now you look at it and there is a race to space, so to speak. Now, a lot of the satellites that have gone up into space are SpaceX satellites due to Starlink. But what that’s done is create an opportunity for other companies to piggyback off the success that even just SpaceX is having and come up with novel ideas about how to collect data from space. Now, I’d be remiss not to mention that the success of SpaceX in launching satellites, just launching and making it inexpensive to launch satellites, is a major factor in a lot of these startups being able to even succeed because you don’t need nearly as much money as you used to be able to launch a satellite. And the hardware is often inexpensive compared to even 20 years ago.
Brad Bode
So in total, everybody did agree space was going to be a huge growth area. And I think now it’s widely considered the next, you know, trillion dollar industry.
Brett
What about conversations with investors? So what I’ve seen right now, or the last maybe one or two years, there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of excitement going into deep tech and hard tech, and a lot of that is, you know, for space and aerospace and defense. What was it like back in 2015 as you were speaking to investors and having these conversations?
Brad Bode
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, we’ve seen a dramatic difference in the way they looked at addressing the government then versus now. Now in the last two years, we’ve certainly seen a lot of companies that were, you know, looking for commercial success pivoting towards focusing primarily on the government. And that’s because the government pays their bills, they fund a lot of things and their budget is enormous. So that deep tech is moving towards funding in the government because a lot of the fun problems are there. And you know, five years ago I remember telling everyone this government work just doesn’t appear to be sexy to the Silicon Valley nerds like me. I just happen to have been, you know, deep in technology and in government work. So I knew how fun it could be. However, not everyone saw that in 2016, 17, 18.
Brad Bode
It’s only since about 2022 where there’s this pivot. And I think a lot of that is the result of capital flows and having to pivot because they realize that these commercial companies are not what’s going to pay the bills. So you have to have both commercial and government success.
Brett
What have you learned about winning government contracts throughout the past nine years?
Brad Bode
Oh, wow. I mean, there could be a whole dissertation on this. But I think one of the most important things is what I just mentioned. You have to have a commercial plan and a government plan. And I think the critical thing in targeting the government is that you must anticipate that it will take longer than you think. So if you have a six month Runway, that’s not going to do it. Your government contract, it could come out in six months and be awarded. It might get delayed a year. And we just had a contract now that we thought was dead. That was a NASA contract. We thought it was dead and then it for a year and then it came back just recently and we don’t know why it went quiet, but that’s the name of the game.
Brad Bode
And then additionally, not just in government contracts, you can get that strange behavior. You can get a halving of the contract value. You know, the estimated contract value could be 100 million. And all of a sudden in six months, you learn just before they’re about to award it that it went down to 50 million. And while those are large numbers, it’s usually a group or a team effort and everybody needs their take. So you know that money can go away quickly. But primarily just the difficulty in projecting and forecasting what the government contracts will do and whether or not they’re awarded at the time they say they will be. But that’s the biggest thing you have to plan for the unknowns. You need a two year Runway with solely focusing on government work, unless you have a really robust commercial pipeline.
Brett
If we look at your revenue just in general terms, what percentage is government.
Brad Bode
Versus commercial right now it’s about 50 for us, it depends on how you slice it. So we have two different sections of our company. So we have our network services, which is the ground software as a service that is really our base offering to the commercial satellite world as well as some government programs. So we’re offering minutes on our antennas through our software. So if someone comes and says I need five minutes three times a day on you know, six different antennas, we can offer that to them. And then on our federal side, so we have a subsidiary called Freedom Space Technologies and that company is primarily only serves the US government. It’s all US owned, 100% US owned, all US employees, and they can do work for the federal government in certain secure areas.
Brad Bode
So really there are two different sections of our company in total that makes up 50%. We anticipate that the Freedom Space technologies will be 80% of the company in the next six months. Because the work that we do there isn’t just offering time on our antenna systems or access to space. It is offering our software capabilities, our software itself and our engineering talent to government programs to apply our software on those programs or sell our software outright or have a combination of our talent being writing code on these programs along with our software and engineering services. So that’s really, you know, where I think the biggest growth is within those government programs. On our Freedom Space technology side and the steady growth in the commercial satellite operation.
Brad Bode
Access to space world is on a steady path, but not on the trajectory of growth that our engineering services and software on Freedoms based technology side.
Brett
And when it comes to how you think about the government as a customer, is it like the government is one customer or all the departments and different government agencies? Completely different. So for example, does the Department of Energy have the same procurement process as the Department of Defense, or is it completely different?
Brad Bode
I would say it’s completely different. Some of them might use some of the same terms, but the expectations and the massaging and the meetings you have to take are always very different. You know, take for example, DIU is Defense Innovation Unit that we won an award from for this thing called hybrid space architecture where we are integrating different ways to talk to space, not just rf, but looking towards the future where we’re using lasers to space for communication. And Defense Innovation Unit, really they’re. One of their main goals is to speed up the procurement of, you know, the solutions that the government needs through private industry. So they’re trying to take a more Silicon Valley type of approach. And then there are other organizations within the government which are taking it even further.
Brad Bode
I’m not the expert on those, but they’re trying to speed up the time in which the government can get some of these hard problems solved. And they’re doing much better because it used to be that there was too much paperwork to jump through to even get private industry involved. You had to have, you know, a staff of six just to deal with government contracts. And that was preventing some really smart companies from being able to bid on these government programs. And so all they were getting was these large aerospace companies which could afford to spend a lot of money on lawyers and contracts and, you know, writing up these big documents. And the government did see that isn’t doing them any favors. And they wanted to get to the smaller companies, the more innovative companies.
Brad Bode
And so they, each agency has been making it easier to bid on those programs. And as you start to get away from these smaller sort of, they’re more like seed contracts. They’re smaller amounts of money, sub $1 million. As you start to grow from receiving those, then you can start to afford to hire people that are specific for government contract that allow you to bid on some of the larger programs that bring in yet more money. So in my experience, they’re all very different. We’ve been on NASA, diu, Space Force, Space Development Agency, and each one is pretty much its own unique thing with some similarities in their overall approach. But you need to know the subtleties of each.
Brett
What about from a go to market Perspective, what does a go to market motion look like when you’re selling to the government?
Brad Bode
So that’s a great question. You can’t really market to the government. You can to some degree. You want to make them aware that you exist and that you have serious people who have worked within the government before, and that helps. But primarily, the best way to start accessing government money and making the government aware of who you are as a company is probably through these small business initiatives. They’re called sivers. They’re usually, they can range from $200,000 to even 10, 15 million, but usually the range is between, you know, 1 to 2 million that you might get. And those are broadcasts out that anyone can bid on them. You just have to know where to go to look. They’re public. You look for a topic that you think you could apply your skills to and you attempt to win it.
Brad Bode
You don’t need a big team. Usually those papers are relatively small. So if you’re doing research that is relevant in the industry, you can cite your past performance on commercial work that you might have done or even research papers that might back up your claims. And in this way, you get your foot in the door with the government so you can show past performance, because that’s one of the things they really look for is past performance on any program, really. And then from there, trying to get on teams to bid on larger programs. Because as a small company, it’s not likely that you’re able to prime or be the number one contractor on the larger programs because there’s a lot of hoops that you have to jump through.
Brad Bode
Like depending on the government program, you might need a facility clearance, which is the ability to hold classified clearances for your employees. It’s not likely that smaller companies have that. So you might partner with a larger company so you can go in on these contracts together to continue to make a name for yourself within the government. And then you start to get recognition for the quality of work that you do. And that’s really, your marketing is winning these small contracts and putting yourself in front of the government as often as possible. And as my chief growth officer or the CEO of Freedom Space Technology will say, you know, you’ve got to take it to the road and you’ve got to go to the grip and grins where you grip handshake and grin, right? And make people aware.
Brad Bode
It is a contact sport, as he says. And I’ve learned that’s very true. There’s no amount of Google Adwords you could do to help you with the government, it is getting to know the people in the government, getting to know their procurement process, and being willing to bid on some of these smaller contracts so you can scale upwards to win some of the bigger contracts.
Brett
We’re getting into our final couple of questions here. So a big one that I want to ask you, a personal one. If we just look at space in general, obviously it’s evolving a lot. I think the costs are going down a lot and there’s just a lot of innovation happening. What percentage chance do you think there is that you’ll go to space in your lifetime?
Brad Bode
Probably zero for me. I would love to. I’d love to be the person to say that I will, but it’s hard on the body. You know, it’s very difficult to go to space. And first off, it’s extremely expensive right now, and I think the costs will come down in 20 years. But am I willing to take the risk is the question. So the risk matrix has to be pretty apparent for me. I’m willing to fly in a plane, but I understand the risk profile. Right. I understand the odds and the statistics, but 20 years from now, am I going to be willing to risk those odds? It depends on the data and the numbers. I’m a numbers person. I like data. Show me that it’s safe and then perhaps I’ll take the risk. But maybe I’ll revise that to, say, 5 to 10%.
Brett
5 to 10%. Okay. If I ever read the news or read in the media that you’ve gone to space, I’ll have to call you out on that. You’re wrong.
Brad Bode
It would be a lot of fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do it. I don’t think my wife would agree, but that’s today. So 20 years from now, you know, risk profile, we’ll revisit. That sounds good.
Brett
I’ll make a note to ping you in 20 years and see where we stand at the numbers. That’s right now, final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture of vision that you guys are really building there?
Brad Bode
Oh, great question. I love this one. I’m just really excited about the fact that space is becoming something that everyone is aware of again. So, you know, there was this space race in the 60s and it continued for some time, and then we kind of forgot about space. It just became something we do. And it’s gotten exciting again. It feels like there’s some mystery there and that a lot of the world’s problems can be solved or augmented by data from space. And it’s very clear to me that a lot of entrepreneurs are looking into space and the government is opening up to entrepreneurs and heck, to solve a lot of the problems that are going to win this space race. Because, let’s face it, we do not want space to be dominated by China or Russia.
Brad Bode
We want to maintain our supremacy in space, and that’s why space force was created. So I believe that in the next five years, we will begin seeing other forms. I mean, I know we will. It’s just a question of time. But we will see other forms of communicating to our satellites or to space in general. It will not just be radio frequency communication, because that’s what we use right now. That’s all of the communication. Well, almost all of the communication to space is different frequency bands. S band, X band, Ka and L band, you know, C band. There’s all these different frequencies we use. However, the data volume is increasing and there’s an upper limit to how much data you can move over those frequencies. There’s also a latency issue.
Brad Bode
So if you collect data and you’re going over, you know, let’s say the Middle east, you might not be able to get that data down for 50 minutes, whatever it is, because the satellite has to get over somewhere on the earth to be able to send that data down. And we need faster access to the data that we’ve collected because that data can actually inform, in particular, wartime environments. It can inform battle environments. And that’s why latency is so important. It’s less important for, let’s say, if you’re doing CO2 emissions, looking for scanning globe for, you know, some type of chemical leak, that’s not as critical. But hurricanes, those are critical. You want to monitor a hurricane so you can have current data, the most current data possible. So you need to get your data down faster.
Brad Bode
So one way to do that is through space relays or cross relaying. There’s different terms for it, but they call it a space relay where your satellite points to another satellite, that points to another satellite, and the data transfers between those satellites and comes down on earth at one location. So now you have a data management problem. Let’s say you can take data from one satellite, move it through five different satellites and get it to Earth. Now you have to have the ability to route that data once it hits Earth. And companies don’t have to worry about how that data gets to them. It should just arrive like the Internet.
Brad Bode
And I Think there’s a lot of opportunity in that space, integrating space relay into our system so that not only can you use a radio frequency antenna, what we call direct to Earth from satellite to that antenna and get your data, or you can use space relay, where the data comes down somewhere else and you do it through our system. And then another method would be what they call optical communications or laser comm. So that is using a pulses of light. So it’s like fiber optics from space to the ground, collecting that light in what amounts to being a large telescope, transforming that data from this optical into digital, just like we confirm, translate RF into digital and then we extract the data.
Brad Bode
So you want to put all of that behind one single piece of software that allows you to access space anytime, anywhere. That’s our slogan. Because ultimately that’s what’s going to happen. You should not be as concerned about where on the Earth the data is getting. You should be more concerned about the amount of data and the timeliness in which you get that data. So in the next five years, we’re really going to see that shape up. And one of the capabilities may end up being SpaceX provided where you send your data to a Starlink terminal in space and then it gets to the ground and then we manage that data. So there will be numerous ways to get your data from space, and we hope to be the ones providing that aggregation of that access.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I really love this conversation. I don’t know that much about winning government contracts, but I feel like I know a little bit more than when I started. And hopefully it’s the same for the founders listening in. Before we do finally wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should we send them?
Brad Bode
That’s a great question. Yes. You know, with regard to the company, you can go to Twitter. It’s @AtLastSpace and on LinkedIn, you just search for Atlas space operations and you will definitely find us. My own Twitter profile is odibrad. That’s B O D E underscore. Brad. I’m happy to have people reach out. We’ve hired a few people who reached out over Twitter.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Brad, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun.
Brad Bode
Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Brett.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast, and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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