Apex Space

Ian Cinnamon is a graduate of MIT, where he worked in Professor Jeremy Wolfe's Visual Attention Lab, and earned an MBA from Stanford. He began his career at Apple in user experience and engineering, then founded the consumer-product company Superlabs, which was acquired by Zynga. In 2016 he founded Synapse Technology Corporation, an AI company for security and defense backed by Founders Fund and 8VC; Synapse was acquired by Palantir in 2020, where Cinnamon worked in business development and AI and saw firsthand how the scarcity of commercial off-the-shelf satellite buses bottlenecked the space industry. He co-founded Apex Space in 2022 with Max Benassi to mass-manufacture productized satellite buses, and serves as CEO.

Max Benassi holds an MS in mechanical engineering with a focus on thermal fluid systems from Southern Methodist University and pursued an MBA at the University of Southern California. He spent more than six years at SpaceX from 2015 to 2021 as a senior propulsion engineer and across manufacturing roles, working on Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starlink. He then became engineering director at Astra, where he led development of the Rocket 4 and deepened his understanding of the unit economics of space systems. A longtime friend of Ian Cinnamon, Benassi co-founded Apex Space in 2022 as CTO, leading the design and production of the company's spacecraft platforms.