When Chase Dalton is thinking about his next career move, he asks himself what a movie audience would want to see. So far, the script took him from high-school-dropout animator, to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works spinoff dealmaker, to the youngest investor on the Techstars Space team.
Every scene has one constant: founders. Dalton loves working with people “so in love with a problem that they are doing this absolutely crazy thing to approach it.”
Opening credits: At 16, Dalton left high school to animate at Super Creative Media, a Los Angeles startup. His favorite part wasn’t the animation, though. “It was staying up at 3am and being around other founders, trying to think about: ‘Are we going to make payroll? Are we going to get this deal done?’” he told Payload.
Plot twist: His introduction to space started with a childhood-science-fair hoverboard. He emailed experts for the math behind it until Robert Boyd—who was working on hybrid airships at Skunk Works—wrote back.
About a decade later, Boyd helped spin that airship program out as AT2 Aerospace. Dalton joined as an intern in 2023 and rose to business development lead, helping take AT2 from zero to more than $130M in firm deposits and commitments—plus more than $1B in letters of intent.
Director’s cut: At Techstars Space, Dalton is one of three investors on the team—backing early stage startups in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Space Force. That partnership surfaces capability gaps the agencies can’t fill internally, and Dalton hunts for founders building toward them.
Outside of his day job, he built grantdata.space, which tracks where SBIR and STTR dollars flow, and serves as a the resource hub for deep-tech founders. He also hosts industry events across Los Angeles.
Dalton thinks the industry is having its own big-screen moment. “Right now, space is sort of like Hollywood in the 1920s, after sound got put in,” he said. “We’re in this really incredible moment.”
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Robert Ihnatisin, Orbital Matter
As an expert in 3D printing for terrestrial applications, Robert Ihnatisin was surprised by how slow the in-orbit manufacturing industry was progressing. So, naturally, he started a company to solve the problem himself.
Patrick Miga, Advanced Space
In first grade, Patrick Miga saw a photo of Neptune (snapped by the Voyager 2 spacecraft).. Ever since then, his life has been directed toward space.
Muhammad Hunain, Melagen Labs
“That’s where I realized we’re stuck at a 1980s standard: still shielding spacecraft with aluminum, and rad-hardened electronics [were] too expensive to build at the scale this economy demands,” Hunain told Payload.
Dallas-based Balerion Space Ventures has surpassed its $200M target for its second fund, the firm announced Thursday. Fund II—which remains open—is more than five times the size of the firm’s debut fund, which came in at just under $40M.
Balerion had closed ~$90M as of May, according to Venture Capital Journal. Cofounder and General Partner Daniel Kleinmann chalked up the momentum since then to portfolio companies hitting milestones and raising up-rounds—which he said resonated with LPs.
The firm is also holding back capital for follow-on rounds. “These are really capital-intensive businesses,” Kleinmann told Payload. “Having the ability to reserve capital to continue supporting these businesses as they hit major technical, commercial, government milestones is really important to us.”
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