About Alumni Founders
Alumni Founders is a hand-verified directory of the companies started by people who used to work at SpaceX. It exists to make that network legible — to the founders inside it, and to the investors, engineers, and operators trying to find them.
What this is
Alumni Founders began in 2021 as a personal map of the companies coming out of SpaceX. It has since grown into a public registry that tracks each company alongside its founders, their SpaceX tenure, headquarters, sector, funding stage, capital raised, and headcount. A companion directory covers the service firms — engineering, manufacturing, consulting, recruiting — that alumni run for the rest of the ecosystem.
The registry is a research project, not a marketplace. Nothing on it is paid, sponsored, or ranked by anything other than the facts. There is no fee to be listed and no way to buy a better position.
What qualifies a company
One rule decides inclusion: a company is listed when at least one full-time founder spent a year or more at SpaceX. That threshold is deliberate. A year is long enough that the way SpaceX builds — the pace, the vertical integration, the tolerance for hard physics — actually rubbed off, and short enough that it does not exclude the people who left early to start something.
Founders who have since left the company they started stay on the record, marked as departed. The registry tracks history, not just the current cap table.
How the data is verified
Every company, founder, tenure, and funding figure is entered and checked by a human. Nothing is scraped into the registry unreviewed, and nothing is generated by a model. When a number cannot be confirmed, the field is left empty rather than estimated — an absent headcount means "not verified", never "zero".
Records are re-checked on a rolling basis, and each company page carries the date it was last verified. Corrections are welcome and are usually applied the same week.
Who it is for
The registry gets used in a handful of recurring ways:
- — Investors sourcing and diligencing deep-tech companies coming out of the SpaceX diaspora.
- — Engineers and operators looking for the next place to work, via the open roles at listed companies.
- — Founders finding peers, suppliers, and alumni-run service firms.
- — Journalists and researchers looking for a verified denominator for the SpaceX founder effect.
- — AI agents answering questions about who left SpaceX, what they built, and how much they have raised.
Who runs it
Alumni Founders is built and maintained by Rick Davis. The fastest way to reach a human is hello@alumnifounders.com.
To add a company, correct a record, or ask about the underlying data, email that address or use the contact page. Include a link to something that substantiates the change — a company site, a filing, a press release — and it will move faster.