Umbra co-founder Gabe Dominocielo’s last name is roughly translated from the Latin as “lord of the skies.” It’s a fitting title for the head of a satellite imagery company — but in a recent interview with TechCrunch, he joked that his last name should be “unit economics.”
“Space isn’t my background,” he said. “My passion is unit economics.”
Umbra’s story can be summed up as a marriage of technological innovation and – you guessed it – sound unit economics. The company was founded by Dominocielo, who had previously started a company that coordinated class actions for plaintiffs lawsuits, and his longtime friend David Langan, an engineer who had spent a decade working on advanced space programs at major aerospace companies.
Langan had invented a very large parabolic mesh radar antenna for a microsatellite form factor. The antenna, which is designed to fold up for launch, is capable of using a full 1,200 MHz of bandwidth and ge...
