Aerospace

8/1297 → 13/810; +0.99 percentage points of formation share.

What used to mean rockets and satellites now mostly means AI layered onto physical infrastructure that already exists, whether that's Elodin writing flight software for drones and satellites, Navier AI replacing CFD grunt work with agents, or Forerunner AI reading aircraft maintenance records. The hardware itself splits into two camps: a defense-and-weapons track represented by Singularity, Ares Industries, and Sorcerer's balloon sensor network, and a services-and-orchestration track like Vendra routing RFQs to US machine shops or Consus routing model calls through compliant infrastructure for contractors who can't touch consumer AI tools directly. That second track is really the tell here, since companies like Gander and Forerunner aren't building spacecraft at all, they're building the software glue that lets existing fleets run leaner. It's telling that this formation grows at 2.60x while the more narrowly defined Drone Defense cluster grows at 6.17x and Hardware at 5.49x, suggesting the weapons and physical-hardware side of aerospace is outpacing the software-and-ops side even within the same founders' cohort. Spaceium's $86.1 million in binding contracts plus $230 million pipeline shows real government and commercial money is already flowing to the hardest physical bets, not just the software wrappers. Much of this became possible only once foundation models got good enough to handle simulation, CFD, and compliance-heavy paperwork reliably, which is largely a post-2023 phenomenon, matching the Summer 2023 and later batch dates on nearly every company listed.

No comparable outside activity is connected yet.