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You’ve seen Mark Cuban invest major amounts of money into products that were pitched on Shark Tank. But two men decided to forgo Shark Tank and cold-email Cuban with a pitch to invest in their exciting start-up. Former Blue Origin engineer Tim Ellis and SpaceX engineer Jordan Noone knew they needed funds and decided to cold-email Cuban in an effort to secure funds from the wealthy businessman who has a net worth of over $3.3 billion. Somehow it worked.
The two men needed capital and sought help from Mark Cuban to fund their 3D-printed rockets. “We actually raised our seed round from Mark Cuban — which was a cold email — a week after we said we are starting the company,” said Ellis. “Yeah, we cold-emailed Mark Cuban with the email tagline, ‘Space is sexy: 3D printing an entire rocket.'”
Ellis revealed that not soon after sending the wonderfully titled email that they received funding from Cubes. “It was two months of due diligence after, but he gave us half a million dollars,” says Ellis. The company formed by Ellis and Noone is known as Relativity Space, and it has raised $8.4 million.
“We are going to live or die based on our ability to be the best in the world at 3D printing for rockets,” Ellis says.
Relativity Space believes the future of space travel is 3D-printed rockets which are cheaper, quicker, and easier to produce. Relativity Space can produce a rocket in 60 days instead of the usual time period of 12-18 months. “If you believe — which I do — that Elon [Musk] will send people and NASA is going to send people to Mars, and we are actually going to go build this city and start settling Mars … you are going to need a whole bunch of other technologies,” Ellis said.
[CNBC]