YC W26 | Founder Beyond Reach Labs | Carnegie Mellon University PhD

Joined January 2021
YC was incredible, as @garrytan said, "YC is the YC for Space Tech". Pele Collins and I are getting back to building! Thanks so much for all the support @sdianahu and @vivianmshen Will be sharing more soon....🚀
Thanks so much for the shoutout @TechCrunch : techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/fr… We are so excited that our mission resonated with so many at Demo Day and everyone who "chased" us down to learn more at our booth. We are building the key infrastructure necessary for expansive growth in space by focusing on deployable solar arrays to unlock power bottlenecks.
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Slava Koblov joined @beyondreachlabs as a Mechanical Engineer this week after working at @Saronic Technologies. Slava is translating his skills in designing large sea vessels to large space structures, which have a lot more engineering challenges in common than one might think. We saw how Slava's work floats...now we are excited to see how they deploy. Welcome Slava!
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Ana Reyes is a startup operations leader with 10+ years of experience building systems, processes, and infrastructure for growing organizations. She has already anticipated @beyondreachlabs operational needs, translated priorities into structured execution, and built practical systems that improve visibility, accountability, and efficiency. Welcome to the team Ana!
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Two weeks ago, we had an issue with Xeometry where parts were not going to be delivered on time. So we reached out to Alejandro McNab-Segarra who ran a precision machine shop in Long Island City and was able to support. The @beyondreachlabs team really connected with Alejandro and invited him to join us full-time. He loved the idea, moved the machines, and now is our Manufacturing Operations Lead. We are excited to keep building our capabilities to support the growing demand for space solar power! Welcome Alejandro!
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Mitchell Fogelson retweeted
I’m joining @ycombinator as a General Partner. YC is a homecoming for every GP. All of us were previously YC founders, and lived the journey that we support founders through every day. Our alma mater taught us the lessons that we pass on. My founder path was infinitely harder than I thought it would be. We hit incredible highs and brutal lows. We came within a few months of zero runway. The YC mantras kept me going: make something people want, and don’t die. Over the course of my companies, we touched thousands of lives: employing people in almost every US state (Alaska still evades me!), and teaching STEM to students from every walk of life. Now, I’ve had the privilege of working with founders who are tackling some of the hardest problems today, including defense, space, energy, and manufacturing. We’re also entering an era of diffusing AI across businesses of all sizes, and founders are bringing these tools into their old workplaces and new customers to make work better. Finally, I’m particularly interested in our work at YC to partner closely with the government to make sure technology serves everyone. Our Startup Industrial Base conference yesterday was the start of this, with more to come. Founders are the backbone of American innovation and core to the future of our country and economy. Thank you to the YC partnership for believing in me, and the YC founders for trusting me. There’s never been a better time to make something people want.
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Pele Collins and I spent a great day yesterday at @NASALangley. We traded full-day briefings where Pele and I presented @beyondreachlabs capabilities and progress, and the teams walked us through the history, programs, facilities, and current work of the Structural Dynamics Branch and the Structural Mechanics and Concepts Branch. Obviously we found a lot of shared interests to build on. Thank you to everyone else who made the visit possible!
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Mitchell Fogelson retweeted
Meet Wally. Our inference stack for open frontier models, built to be the fastest place to run them. Performance snapshot: GLM-5.3 Flash: 380 tok/s. GLM-5.3 Max: 790 tok/s Qwen3.8-27B: 485 tok/s DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash: 615 tok/s 1/7
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Thank you, North American Clean Energy, for the feature. With #ClimateweekNYC kicking off next week, I'm looking forward to more conversation about how space infrastructure is keeping pace with the surging power demands of data centers, communications and network infrastructure, and the wealth of data coming from Earth-imaging satellites and services. At @beyondreachlabs, we're focused on unlocking the full potential of space with the most capable satellite solar solutions yet with our Flarewing™ line designed and built in Brooklyn!
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Mitchell Fogelson retweeted
So recent YC batches have seen a 5x increase in the number of hardware startups per batch (4% to 20%). Love that BUT it’s only the tip of the iceberg… until space is unlocked as truly accessible industrial layer Once Starship is flying 1000 times a year, it will become increasingly obvious that space is the easiest layer to put large industries in. My bold prediction: YC 2029 batches will be 90% hardware.
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of the Lightcone, @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it. 01:06 — Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms 03:29 — Why AI Is Making Hard Tech Easier 05:21 — Defense, Manufacturing, and the Return of Hard Tech 09:48 — AI Compute Is Becoming a Physical Infrastructure Problem 12:34 — Robotics Is Approaching Its ChatGPT Moment 15:40 — Software Isn’t Dead. It’s Becoming the Harness 17:59 — Why AI Startups Are Growing Faster 22:52 — The Hidden Boom in Data and RL Environments 27:08 — Why Robotics Will Need Specialized Models 29:38 — The Rise of the Solo Founder 32:54 — Why Experienced Founders Are Back 34:59 — What Founders Should Do Right Now
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Thanks so much @sdianahu for the shout out of @beyondreachlabs!
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of the Lightcone, @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it. 01:06 — Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms 03:29 — Why AI Is Making Hard Tech Easier 05:21 — Defense, Manufacturing, and the Return of Hard Tech 09:48 — AI Compute Is Becoming a Physical Infrastructure Problem 12:34 — Robotics Is Approaching Its ChatGPT Moment 15:40 — Software Isn’t Dead. It’s Becoming the Harness 17:59 — Why AI Startups Are Growing Faster 22:52 — The Hidden Boom in Data and RL Environments 27:08 — Why Robotics Will Need Specialized Models 29:38 — The Rise of the Solo Founder 32:54 — Why Experienced Founders Are Back 34:59 — What Founders Should Do Right Now
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Welcome to the @beyondreachlabs team Evan Burger! Evan joins us from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he worked across the full design cycle, from concept through delivery, on missions ranging from highly reliable flagship programs to fast-paced rapid development efforts. We are excited to see what Evan brings to Beyond Reach as we push the boundaries of deployable space solar. Welcome back to New York, Evan! There has never been a better time to be an engineer and space enthusiast in NYC, with incredible talent like Evan and opportunities at Beyond Reach Labs!
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Nothing is beyond reach for Britney!
Replying to @beyondreachlabs
@beyondreachlabs is super excited to have Britney Lee join our team as a Mechanical Engineer! She has already been at Beyond Reach for a little over a week and has been absolutely crushing it from day 1. We are so glad that we convinced Britney to stay in NYC and help us build the most capable space solar arrays. Britney has an incredible background supporting hardware teams at Apple and BrewBird. She also has an MFA and is an incredible furniture designer! Join me in welcoming Britney, and reach out if you want to work with amazing people like Britney in Brooklyn, NY!
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The classic "build vs. buy" question came up repeatedly at @SmallSat this year. Most people reach for @SpaceX as the model and try to replicate vertical integration everywhere. But my co-founder and @beyondreachlabs CTO, Pele Collins, was the responsible engineer for the Dragon parachutes...a system SpaceX chose to source from specialists rather than build. When the company most famous for vertical integration draws a line, the line is worth understanding. I wrote a short piece on why deployable space structures sit on the same side of that line, and how Beyond Reach Labs Flarewing™ is helping shape that decision.
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Mitchell Fogelson retweeted
Flarewing packs 800 W/kg on the primary structure and that is literally off the charts 📈 This is going to be a mega unlock if you want to just focus on building out the rest of your satellite and payload. Congrats BRL!
Replying to @beyondreachlabs
@beyondreachlabs is announcing Flarewing™, our answer to the fast-growing power demand on satellites. Flarewing™ comes in three configurations built around common satellite form factors, from ESPA-class up to large buses, topping out at 200 kW on the Flarewing-L. Flarewing™ packs up to 100 kW per cubic meter of stowed volume depending on configuration. Thanks to our novel mechanism, our large deployed array area doesn't come at the cost of stiffness. All max configurations hold a first structural mode above 0.05 Hz, maintaining satellite maneuverability and pointing accuracy. Flarewing-S completed its first deployment and is on track to finish a full space qualification campaign before the end of 2026, with the M and L to follow. Built for constellations that need real power at production scale. Our team has been focused on the power problem, so if you want your satellites in Space faster, the question of buy vs. build has never been easier.
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