Mark Matossian Co-Founds Whipsmart Ventures to Fund the Series A Gap in Space and Deep Tech

The space economy has never had more money flowing into it — and rarely has that money been so unevenly distributed across a startup's life. Space technology companies raised $7.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone, according to the Seraphim Space Index, yet founders still describe a starvation zone between the seed capital that funds a prototype and the Series B growth rounds that reward proven traction. Whipsmart Ventures, a new venture capital fund co-founded by space startup veteran Mark Matossian, is built as a direct answer to that gap.

Matossian brings an unusually operational resume to the fund. An aerospace engineer with a PhD in operations research and optimization, he spent 13 years managing projects at Google, ran program management, satellite production, and launch for Terra Bella — the satellite imaging company Google later sold to Planet — led Iceye US, and co-founded Lonestar Data Holdings, the lunar data-storage startup with a NASA Space Act Agreement. He has, in his own words, lived the funding gap through a number of startups. Now he intends to fund his way across it.

The Fund at a Glance

Whipsmart was co-founded earlier in 2026 by three complementary partners. Alongside Matossian is Lylan Masterman, a software developer and technology executive with an MBA who became a venture capitalist in 2014, and Judy Robinett, a corporate leader and venture capitalist best known as the author of How to be a Power Connector and Cracking the Funding Code. The division of labor writes itself: an operator who has built and launched satellites, a career investor who knows the venture mechanics, and a super-connector whose entire public identity is built on opening doors for founders raising capital.

The Thesis: Fund the Leap From Lab to Scale

Whipsmart's stated focus is identifying pivotal technologies that can close a business plan — and helping companies make the leap from laboratory demonstrations to commercial scale. Matossian frames the target company precisely: maybe they have flown a prototype, but do they have final product-market fit? Can they turn the corner of that inflection point and go to scale? Masterman is even more direct, calling it the classical definition of Series A. The fund will lead and co-lead rounds for companies raising as much as $20 million.

The counter-cyclical angle matters too. Supporting companies through economic cycles of space investment is central to the pitch: when there is a downturn and bubbles burst, Matossian argues, quality startups need to be coached to manage cash carefully. That is a fund positioning itself not just as a check writer but as an operator-in-the-boardroom — which is exactly how Whipsmart says it will behave.

Concentrated Checks, Board Seats, First Phone Calls

Instead of spreading many small checks across a broad index of startups, Whipsmart plans to make significant, concentrated investments. The firm will often take a board seat, and its ownership percentage will be correspondingly larger. Masterman summarizes the ambition in relationship terms: Whipsmart wants to be the first phone call for entrepreneurs, whether something good or bad is happening. In an industry where many space-focused funds operate as high-volume seed indexers, that is a deliberate contrarian posture — fewer positions, deeper involvement, more governance responsibility.

The Seven Disruptions

Whipsmart's investable universe is organized around seven areas where technology is disrupting traditional industries — a list that reads as much like a national-resilience agenda as a venture thesis:

• Secure and reliable position, navigation and timing (PNT)
• Robotics and autonomous operations that enhance human productivity
• Real-time intelligence to detect and react to disasters, industrial hazards, military threats, and climate risks
• Regional and sovereign technology for defense, cloud infrastructure, space systems, manufacturing, communications, and critical resources
• Edge processing and orbital compute
• Resilient, distributed energy
• Global, affordable broadband connectivity

The firm also reserves the right to invest in exceptional SpaceTech and DeepTech companies that fall outside the seven categories. But the framing is telling: every one of the seven maps to a demand signal that is structural rather than speculative — GPS vulnerability, labor scarcity, disaster response, sovereign procurement, data gravity in orbit, grid fragility, and the connectivity gap. This is a thesis built on problems that do not go away when venture sentiment cools.

Why an Operator Fund, and Why Now

The timing is not accidental. The Q2 2026 funding surge shows the sector is flush at the extremes: mega-rounds for established players and abundant seed capital for new entrants. What the surge conceals is the mortality in the middle — companies that proved their technology but could not fund the industrialization phase. A fund that concentrates capital, takes board seats, and coaches cash discipline is structurally matched to that phase in a way that high-volume seed funds and momentum-chasing growth funds are not.

The BlacKnight Take

Whipsmart is a small story with a large signal. The space venture market is professionalizing by stage: the era when one generalist space fund covered everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO is giving way to specialists who own a specific transition — and the lab-to-scale transition is the one where operator knowledge compounds fastest. Matossian's resume is precisely the kind that translates into credible board-level coaching: he has run satellite production, led a U.S. subsidiary of a foreign-owned SAR operator, and co-founded a startup attempting something as unforgiving as lunar data centers.

The open questions are the usual ones for a first-time fund: size, portfolio pace, and whether the concentrated model survives contact with a market where hot Series A rounds get competitive. But the strategic read is clean. If the seven disruptions list looks like a sovereign-resilience shopping list, that is because the biggest customer class of the next decade — governments and the primes that serve them — is shopping from exactly that list. A Series A fund that positions its portfolio on those demand lines, then coaches companies through the industrialization valley, is playing the stage of the market where the 2030s' defining space companies will actually be forged.

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