Apex was founded in 2022 by Ian Cinnamon and Max Benassi and is headquartered in Los Angeles. The company set out to fix a chronic bottleneck in the space industry: the satellite bus, the core spacecraft chassis that provides power, propulsion, attitude control, and structure for a payload, was traditionally custom-built for each mission, taking years and enormous cost to procure. Apex instead treats the bus as a product.
Apex designs a small family of standardized satellite bus platforms that customers can configure and order much like a commercial product, then integrate their payloads onto. This productized approach dramatically shortens lead times and lowers cost, enabling operators to field constellations and responsive missions far faster than legacy procurement allows.
At its Los Angeles Factory One, a 50,000-square-foot production complex, Apex builds buses ahead of need, maintaining an inventory of platforms ready for rapid integration. This 'build-ahead' model is particularly valuable for national-security missions where speed matters, supporting applications such as missile defense, space-based interceptors, LEO and GEO space domain awareness, and resilient combat power in orbit. Apex flew its first spacecraft, Aries, and passed a one-year on-orbit milestone, validating its hardware in operations.
Apex raised a $95M Series B in 2024 and then a $200M Series C announced in April 2025, led by Point72 Ventures and co-led by 8VC, with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz and new investors Washington Harbour Partners and StepStone Group. The capital funds a major expansion of production capacity to meet rapidly growing commercial and government demand for its satellite bus platforms.