Stell, a startup building an efficient workflow platform for the aerospace industry, announced this morning the closing of a $3.1M pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures and Third Prime VC.
The comms problem: When it comes to communicating the deeply complex, technical information critical to aerospace engineering, a lot can get lost in translation. “The tooling to communicate well is not really there across the supply chain,” Malory McLemore, cofounder and CEO of Stell, told Payload.
McLemore experienced these problems working as a liaison and product manager at companies including Airbus, Raytheon, and Hadrian. “It wasn’t that the suppliers didn’t care,” she said. “It was just really hard to do a good job when you can’t communicate that really technical information.”
At Harvard Business School, McLemore teamed up with Anne Wen, former biz dev specialist at Mission Control, to build their supplier communications platform.
Maximizing productivity: Stell’s platform is designed to minimize engineering hours spent on sending emails and playing paperwork ping-pong. “You can add things like comments, history, and it’s connected to the RFQ and the purchase order,” said McLemore. “All of the technical information you need to schedule a job is actually live and you can engage with it.”
What’s next? So far, Stell has designed the bones of its platform and is working on building out its functionality. The founding team has brought on a lead engineer and is currently on the hunt for another engineer and a designer.
