Interviewee
Nicolas Gaume is the Co-Founder & CEO at Space Cargo Unlimited, the European startup founded in 2014 dedicated to seizing the potential of microgravity research for commercial applications on Earth. Since the age of 19, founded or co-founded nine startups in multiple fields: gaming, web services, B2B trading, mobile and social apps publishing, software development tools, children book publishing, consulting services.
Transcript
Nicolas Gaume: I'm French, I grew up in the southwest of France and in a city named AR in the Bay of ar, nearby Bordeaux, a big city known for its wine and to a large degree aerospace industry. So it starts right there. I mean there's a lot of the Aryan and a rocket engine and the number of key components and a lot of planes are built in the area. So certainly that kind of nurtured me, my early days. But I was primarily a computer geek and I eventually became an entrepreneur at a young age when I started my first startup, I was a late 18 year old. So I really started when I was 19 and I started a game studio so quite far away from, from the space industry all up.
That led me to exciting moments, ups and downs. And in 2014 with the experience I had, I really with the passion for space and off space that I had with my co-founder and friend Emmanuel Etpa who decided to start Space Cargo Unlimited. And I was only the beginning cuz other things happened afterwards. But I have a chance to talk about this today.
Elisa Muñoz: How do you actually meet your co-founder? I mean, back in 2014 you already had some experience with startups, but what was the main trigger for you to be like, “Okay, I'm gonna found this exact company?
Nicolas Gaume: So Space Cargo Unlimited was my eighth startup, so I had seven before and my third one was with Emmanuel. We actually, so I started my company as a game studio when I was 18. You know, it started to grow well and Apple invested in the company when I was 21.
We bet on the game market becoming big and it did, we bet on Macintosh and Windows becoming the home computing references and they did, we bet on 3D becoming more important than it did. So it was kind of really, a great few years of success and Emmanuel started online gaming way before online gaming was a thing and we started connecting around tech technology innovation and that's how we became friends. And further on we kept friendship and certainly we shared complimentary skills. So it was, it was great. Emmanuel is is fantastic when it comes to translating science into projects and means we both love science and what really was the first thing that got us going for Space Cargo Unlimited was the amazing amount of research done on International Space Station and prior to that on, on a various set of laboratories in in, in different vehicles.
But all this research kind of demonstrated, there are a lot of amazing things happening when you recreate the earth's atmosphere and you remove gravity, which is something you can't do on earth for a long time. So basically same temperature, same brightness, same impression. Without gravity means that life evolves differently. Meaning that some processes related to new materials cannot happen the same way. And it's been tested for decades on the space station and it's all documented, it's all online, you can shake it out yourself. But Emanuel, I kind of really went deep into it and realized there was an amazing amount of opportunities that we could seize for impactful projects back on earth. And I think one of the things that I share is a passion for bringing something impactful, useful. And that first project we started was for agriculture. And I can tell you more about it, but that's, that's how we started the journey.
Space Cargo Unlimited was my eighth startup, I had seven before and my third one was with Emmanuel, my co-Founder. I actually started in the space industry when I was 19.
Elisa Muñoz: I mean you guys mentioned that you are in the medical field and building new materials. So maybe you can share a little bit about that?
Nicolas Gaume: Yeah, we, as a company, started by focusing on agriculture. I'm my, on my mother's side, my grandparents were, were, were farmers and, and, and were selling foods and vegetables. So I guess, and you know, they were doing the hard work of farming, which is demanding. And so it's really something that I feel is super important. And obviously when you look at the Maslow pyramid of needs for humans, the first base is, no, it's not wifi, it's food.But you know, with climate change, growing food is more challenging in some areas of the world. So we came across a number of, you know, scientific research showing that plants could adapt naturally to the environment of space without gravity and, and the theory. And that led us to meet a number of researchers. Eventually we met Michael Lambert who was a professor, a German professor in the FIU Ellan University of cellular biology. And he's been really passionate about research on space and agriculture for quite a while. So we leveraged that vast knowledge that Michael brought to us.
And as we are from Bordeaux, which is a wine country, we realized also that we could possibly do work benefit to all agriculture, but really rooted into viticulture just because viticulture is a more lucrative agricultural segment, therefore they're more research, more researcher, more funding into scientific knowledge which we could leverage when it comes to exploring something we still very much unknown, which is again, the effect of space on on living organism. And doing that we realized there were many other, many other applications. You mentioned new materials. It is true that new materials are an exciting component.
If you blend two materials on earth, the heavier one goes down, the lighter one goes up cuz of gravity, you remove gravity and you do the same blend. It's a perfect blend. Much more ous and many, many other opportunities that we find exciting. And when we realized that to make all this, it remains very complicated because space access to space is challenging and that's changing because of lower cost of launch because there are many more launches and price going down. And then we look at what was wrong in the way we were conducting not so much research but at scale manufacturing. And the answer was simple. Humans, when you put humans in the same space station, same space vehicle, the security, the safety of the humans always prevail.
You don't wanna lose the astronauts up there and if you have plants, astronaut plants, astronaut, you choose the astronaut. So it's really that obvious. But humans put a set of constraints on complex obstacles for anything manufacturing. You have one electric system on the ISS, it both supports the life function of the astronauts as much as your manufacturing equipment. It's one atmosphere. If something a gas goes into the atmosphere of the ISS, it could jeopardize the health of the astronauts. So all these constraints are enormous. That's why we decided to make a fully automated vehicle, which is the one we announced last week.
Elisa Muñoz: So thank you so much for sharing. I was about to ask you about the new REV ONE and how it works and about the technology?
Nicolas Gaume: That. Sure. You should share the video link if you can by the way to, to the, so we look at multiple options. What we wanted, as I said, was an automated vehicle that would fly for two to three months, which is an average time that you can have multi generation, multi-generation of sales. You have enough time to put 3D printers and manufacture things in space. The principle is to take off, fly and come back.
Now coming back is challenging. It's, it's a set of technology, it's a very challenging thing to come back from our, our space into earth. And you know, we decided to be a fabulous organization. So in other words, we decided not to start from scratch and build our own vehicle. We rather use what is best, what works and, and kind of make it more performing and more effective for what it is we want to do. Cuz we also want it to be super dedicated. So basically much no humans on board leveraging what exists and fully focused on in space manufacturing. It happens that the European Space Agency has been funding a program largely with an Italian space agency and an amazing company in space, which we've been working with for our wine vine project mission wise. And we decided, we really became really close to them and and very excited about their knowledge and expertise and leadership as much as they cut. I think quite excited about our startup culture, you know, being very much with a sense of urgency and a sense of outcomes of impact, a lot of agility. And I think that the combination of a large group with a lot of knowledge and expertise and, obviously, the managing tech technical depth, engineering depth that they have along with our agility make a really amazing combination. So we're leveraging an existing program called I X V. It's a, it's a vehicle that flew pretty much eight years ago if I'm not mistaken and proven a number of key elements including this shield for reentry.
There's a new evolution of that program funded by the European Space Agency named Space Rider, which is bringing technology further. So we basically took this and we did like every geek slash engineer slash startup we dismantle it, we take very bits and pieces and say, is it useful? No right away is it useful? Yes, but we should make it more effective, can we reuse it? Okay, no, well let's reuse it. And we ended up building a design which we are still working on with the great engineering team at Talls a space. And you know, we'll be finished by next year and then we'll start manufacturing it. And the goal is to fly to the end of 25 boards. There will be a fully automated setup.
We have been quite innovative in terms of providing the right level of electricity, blood level of, of, of, let's say heat management and, and and, and all the conditions related to a variety of payload. Cuz we'll have plants, we'll have three printers manufacturing something, we'll have passive containers, we'll have bioreactors. So all this needs to be on the same vehicle without compromising each other. So a lot of work is still to be done on this. That's the core of expertise. That's what really we do inside the vehicle structure, which is done by TAs. And we are really excited because things are going really in the right direction.And, and, and we'll be offering this to a variety of customers willing to rent our factory. We probably will use a portion of this for our own programs on agriculture and viticulture, but most of it will be to rent to any industrial company interested.
Elisa Muñoz: Congratulations on that. Super excited about this! I wanted to ask you about the biggest challenge that you have solved while starting this project?
Nicolas Gaume: The real challenge was certainly learning space. Cuz when we started with Emmanuel, we had no clue. I mean we have, we were like geeks or learning fast, but we had no space engineering background so we had to learn to. But you know, when you're passionate it goes fast. And I think that engineering is the best. I mean it's, it's really understanding how things work. It's optimizing processes and I love these two things, understanding and optimization. I love the iterative process.
But no, we, we, that was, that was challenging but we did it with passion on the business side. Funding, it's super hard to fund a research project per se. So a research project in space is even more complicated. So we had to be creative. So one of the things we did is, it happens that we send wine and wine. Well we, we, we kind of sold some of these assets. So the wine was sent purely for scientific purposes. And again, we are gonna publish a lot of our discoveries. We are really excited about the scientific outcomes of that research. But we also realized that this bottle was unique because it went to space. It's a very well known BD of wine and, and we realized that it could be of interest to wine lovers. And so we teamed up with Christie's, which is an auction house and they sold the bottle quite expensively. And with the money where we could pay the researcher that works on the wine research as much as the vine research up to the point, we get enough results to raise funds further. So that is really in, in startup terms, you say bootstrap, but you know, it has to be creative. So that's the kind of thing we did. So I think, you know, it's exciting because when you start any entrepreneurial project, the constraints become opportunities for being creative and hopefully finding a path to solutions. So I love that.
Elisa Muñoz: Last but not least: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting on this space path?
Nicolas Gaume: I'm gonna say very obvious things. It's, it's always about the use. I mean, I see too many young engineers building solutions that then look for a problem to solve. So always start with what you want to, to change the impact you want to have and then get to the right solution.
And that's really listening, looking at how people live, use and, and do things. So cuz when you have an engineering culture, you tend to see the marvel of what you're doing. So listening is a very important skill set. The second thing I would say, always choose s WP against nih.
NIH was not invented here, which means start from scratch, build everything. “SWP” stolen with pride, you know, you can learn from others, you can reimagine things that exist from them. I think that's, that's a path of humility of hard work. But WP always proved to be more effective than nih, which is arrogance and I know better than anybody else.
Elisa Muñoz Wow, that was some of the best advice I've ever heard. It was a pleasure having you in the podcast.
Nicolas Gaume: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
