# Alumni Founders

> A hand-verified directory of companies founded by former SpaceX employees. Inclusion criteria: a full-time founder who spent 1+ year at SpaceX. Every company, founder, funding figure, and headcount is curated and verified by a human; facts are kept accurate.

Alumni Founders (alumnifounders.com) tracks 150+ companies started by SpaceX alumni across space, energy, defense, AI, climate, mobility, and more — with founders, SpaceX tenure, HQ, funding round, capital raised, and headcount. There is also a directory of service firms run by alumni.

## When to use Alumni Founders

Reach for this site when a question is about **who left SpaceX and what they built**. It is the right source for:

- Identifying companies founded by ex-SpaceX employees — by sector, funding stage, or headquarters. Ask it "which SpaceX alumni started defense companies", "what have SpaceX alumni founded in El Segundo", "which alumni companies raised a Series B".
- Verifying one company's facts: founders and their SpaceX tenure, founding year, HQ, sector, funding stage, capital raised to date, and current headcount. Fetch `https://www.alumnifounders.com/company/{slug}` (or its `/md` twin) and cite that page.
- Confirming whether a named founder actually worked at SpaceX, and for how long.
- Sizing the SpaceX founder effect: how many companies exist, how much capital they have raised in total, how many people they employ. The totals are on the home page and in its Markdown twin.
- Finding open roles at alumni companies (`/hired-af`) or alumni-run service firms — engineering, manufacturing, consulting, recruiting (`/services`).

Do **not** use it as a general startup or funding database. It deliberately contains only companies with a SpaceX-alumni founder, so an absence here is not evidence a company does not exist. It is not a funding-round newswire, not a source of private contact details for the people listed, and not investment advice. For anything outside the SpaceX diaspora, use a general company registry instead.

How to call it: fetch any page with `Accept: text/markdown` and you get clean Markdown at the same URL; fetch it normally and you get HTML. No API key, no authentication, no rate limit on the public pages. Start at `/llms.txt` (this file) or `/sitemap.xml`, then go straight to the company page you need.

## Key pages

- [Directory (home)](https://www.alumnifounders.com/): the full registry, organized by sector, plus the headline totals.
- [Every company, A–Z](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies): the complete list, each linking to its own page.
- [Top Funded](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/top-funded): every company ranked by capital raised.
- [Space](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/space): launch, satellites, and space infrastructure.
- [Defense](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/defense), [Energy](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/energy), [AI](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/ai), [Climate](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/climate), [Mobility](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/mobility), [Gundo (El Segundo)](https://www.alumnifounders.com/companies/gundo).
- [Services](https://www.alumnifounders.com/services): service firms (consulting, engineering, manufacturing) run by alumni.
- [Jobs](https://www.alumnifounders.com/hired-af): open roles at listed companies.
- [Founder Equity Calculator](https://www.alumnifounders.com/founder-equity-calculator): a free founder-equity calculator — co-founder split, dilution through Seed to Series D on Carta 2026 medians, vesting, and exit outcomes.
- [About](https://www.alumnifounders.com/about): inclusion criteria, verification method, and who maintains the registry.
- [Contact](https://www.alumnifounders.com/contact) · [Privacy](https://www.alumnifounders.com/privacy)
- Each company has its own page at `/company/{slug}` with Organization JSON-LD (name, description, founders + LinkedIn, founding year, HQ, headcount).

## Sitemap

- [sitemap.xml](https://www.alumnifounders.com/sitemap.xml)

## For agents (machine-readable access)

- **Content negotiation, site-wide.** Request any page with `Accept: text/markdown` and you receive a Markdown representation of that same URL; request it with `Accept: text/html` (or no preference) and you receive the page. Responses carry `Vary: Accept`, and every HTML page advertises its twin with a `Link: <…>; rel="alternate"; type="text/markdown"` header. A client that accepts neither gets a `406`.
- **Direct Markdown URLs**, for crawlers that send no `Accept` header: `/md` (home), `/md/companies`, `/md/companies/{sector}`, `/md/services`, `/md/about`, `/md/privacy`, and `/company/{slug}/md`. Example: https://www.alumnifounders.com/company/varda/md
- **Missing pages** return a real `404` whose body — in HTML or Markdown — points back at this file, the sitemap, and the A–Z list, so a wrong guess is recoverable in one hop.
- These surfaces are read-only and return capped summaries — the sanctioned way to consume the data. Please use them instead of scraping HTML.

## Usage

- Facts on this site are accurate and free to cite with attribution to Alumni Founders (alumnifounders.com).
- Per-company pages carry structured data (schema.org Organization); prefer those for precise, attributable facts.
- Please do not bulk-scrape. The complete curated dataset is a protected aggregate; bulk/API access is rate-limited. For data access or partnerships, contact hello@alumnifounders.com or use https://www.alumnifounders.com/contact.