Whipsmart Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
Whipsmart Ventures is a newly formed venture firm investing in SpaceTech and DeepTech startups. Its tagline is "The companies the future depends on." The firm organizes everything it backs around seven "fundamental disruptions" that it expects to reshape how people work, communicate and thrive across the converging domains of space, defense, robotics, energy and edge compute:
- PNT Revolution. Secure, reliable position, navigation and timing, including GPS-denied navigation, resilient timing and anti-jamming and anti-spoofing systems.
- Robotics Multiplier and Physical AI. Autonomous machines that do dangerous or labor-short work, so that one expert can oversee dozens of autonomous operations.
- Real-Time Intelligence. Satellites, sensors, drones and AI that detect and react to disasters, industrial hazards and military threats at machine speed.
- Tech Sovereignty. Nations demanding domestic control of defense, cloud, space, manufacturing and communications stacks.
- Edge and Orbital Compute. Real-time compute everywhere, including data centers in orbit and on the Moon.
- Universal Power. Energy in the hardest places.
- Global Connectivity. Affordable broadband anywhere, including LEO and mmWave links.
Co-founder Lylan Masterman describes the underlying belief: the marriage of software and hardware is the defining technology thesis, and deep-tech sectors (space, robotics, energy, defense) are undergoing a software transformation. Whipsmart favors startups where software creates defensible advantages in industries with massive TAMs and long innovation cycles.
What They Look For
The firm invests "where technology risk is reduced and commercial inflection is imminent." Its four criteria are a deep technical moat (advances in hardware, materials science or AI that cannot be replicated with capital alone), scalable impact across industries and geographies, exceptional founding teams with years of domain thinking, and commercial inflection (the product works and the company is ready to scale go-to-market and hiring). Masterman asks founders for their sales deck rather than their investor deck, because in deep tech "the graveyard is full of brilliant technology that never found a buyer."
Stage Focus and Check Size
Masterman's personal site says the fund focuses on "Series A and larger seed investments." That points to larger seed rounds and Series A, with technology de-risked and early product-market fit in view. The firm has published no check size, fund size, ownership target or reserve policy. Those fields are left unset rather than guessed.
Lead Tendency and Involvement
The first-90-days plan on the site says "Board seat confirmed" in weeks 1 and 2. That implies Whipsmart takes board seats and expects meaningful positions, which is consistent with leading or co-leading, but no lead-versus-follow statement is published, so lead tendency is recorded as unknown. Involvement is high: a firm-wide meeting every two weeks devoted solely to helping each portfolio company (customers, talent, partners, investors, acquirers), curated next-round-investor dinners hosted by portfolio CEOs, and a CRM-tracked bench of 31 team members and advisors mapped by expertise. The 90-day plan runs from advisor matching and intros (month 1), through next-round investor introductions and narrative work (month 2), to a milestone assessment and a thought-leadership dinner with prospective next-round investors (month 3).
Recent Activity and Fund Status
SpaceNews reported on 2026-07-23 that space-startup veteran Mark Matossian co-founded Whipsmart Ventures with software engineer Lylan Masterman and networking strategist Judy Robinett. The firm states it is newly formed with no operating history or investment track record of its own, and its site lists no portfolio companies. The fund status is therefore early: it is being built and is presumably raising or just starting to deploy. No fund close, fund size or announced investment has been published as of 2026-10-23.
Portfolio and Track Record
Whipsmart has no disclosed portfolio. Its track-record page lists companies from the principals' prior careers (aQuantive, Google, DoubleVerify, ICEYE, Lonestar Data Holdings, White Star Capital, Teledesic, Microsoft, Figure Eight, Mnubo, Unacast, GigaBeam, IMMUNIO, Golden Seeds, Junction, Resilinc). The page says explicitly that these are NOT the investment performance of Whipsmart or any fund it manages. They are therefore not recorded as Whipsmart portfolio companies. Highlights from that prior experience include the $6.3B Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive, Figure Eight's $300M sale to Appen, Mnubo's roughly $102M sale to Aspen Technology, IMMUNIO's 2017 sale to Trend Micro, and a $28M Unacast financing in December 2025.
Team
- Lylan Masterman, Co-founder and Managing Partner. Former Microsoft engineer on Visual Studio .NET and C#, Microsoft Research, and Atlas at aQuantive. He joined White Star Capital in 2014 as one of six original members and became General Partner of its $180M Fund II. He sat on five White Star boards and has been a board member or observer at eight companies. Kauffman Fellow, based in New York.
- Mark Matossian, Ph.D., Co-founder and Managing Partner. Aerospace engineer with a PhD in satellite-constellation optimization. Worked on Iridium, ICO and Teledesic, spent 13 years at Google (data-center hardware, payments, OneWeb, Terra Bella), was CEO of ICEYE US, and was co-founder and CTO of Lonestar Data Holdings (lunar data centers, missions IM-1 and IM-2).
- Judy Robinett, Co-founder and Founding Partner. Former CEO of public company Medical Discoveries, former Managing Director of Golden Seeds, and author of How to Be a Power Connector and Crack the Funding Code. Her role is network and door-opening for founders.
The extended bench of 31 advisors spans astronauts, ex-Google infrastructure leaders, defense officers, energy investors and robotics founders.
Decision Process
The firm describes itself as a partnership with three co-founding partners and firm-wide support, but publishes no formal decision process. It is recorded as partnership at low confidence.
Founder Preferences
Founders with deep domain expertise who have thought about their problem for years, not months, defensible technical moats, and a credible go-to-market. Masterman especially enjoys backing young entrepreneurs.
Geographic Focus
Offices are listed in New York City, Silicon Valley and Salt Lake City. No geographic restriction is published. The thesis is explicitly global, covering sovereign technology needs in the EU, Brazil, the US and elsewhere. Headquarters is recorded as New York, NY at moderate confidence, since the site lists three offices without naming a head office and Masterman is New York-based.
Gaps
No fund size, check size, AUM, announced investments or lead policy are public. The SpaceNews article is paywalled, so only its headline and first paragraph were read. A refresh is worthwhile after the first investments are announced.