Veterans of SpaceX’s hiring team have launched a new, hard tech venture fund with a unique approach to working with portfolio companies: They help find the right talent to boost early-stage startups.
Unmatched is led by partners Aaron Zeeb, Holly Rockwell, Todd Gitlin, Simon Casuto, and Shaina Semiatin. The company expects to focus its investments on a familiar stack of business models: Aerospace and defense, advanced manufacturing, automation, and energy tech.
People-powered: All the partners have experience in executive search, but Zeeb and Rockwell were hiring managers at SpaceX when the rocket maker was scaling up.
“My team was responsible for building about 70% of SpaceX capabilities prior to [the] Falcon 9 launch and Dragon launch, so all of my initial experience came from scaling Elon [Musk]’s company,” Rockwell told Payload. “There’s not a ton of people in the hard tech space who do…recruiting, and understand the talent landscape the way we do.”
The meat in team: Startups live and die on the quality of their staff, and Unmatched hopes to use their expertise in human capital to find and boost portfolio companies. They will work with early-stage, hard tech companies to recruit staff either on a fee basis, or for equity, or to obtain rights to invest in the company’s next fundraising round.
“It gives us an opportunity to see how the products fit the market, how the executive team operate and make decisions with one another, and to find someone who can help scale their business,” Rockwell said. “It gives us this unique insight and this unique seat at the table, working with the executives and deciding whether or not we will invest in future rounds.”
Track record: Unmatched is investing on behalf of its partners and several high-net-worth individuals; and declined to disclose current assets under management. The company has eight portfolio companies, and has provided recruiting services to space firms like Vast, LeoLabs, Phase Four and Astra.
