 Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Amazon Remars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for two days live coverage and we're getting all the stories. And the story here is our entrepreneur hot startup, making things happen, making more connectivity go. Diana Ganzina, founder and CEO of Elv Speed. Elv or Elv Speed, welcome to theCUBE. Well, speed represents how fast we can transfer the data. And so an Elv is a upper electro sort of magnetic phenomena that lives above thunderstorms and it moves very, very fast. It looks like it moves faster than the speed of light. So we play on the speed of Elv's. Well, let's get into it because I love the approach you're taking. And this is consistent with the theme of the show. A lot of industrial change and innovations, sometimes recycling old technology to help invent new ones, integrations, platforms coming together, a little bit more open, less proprietary. You're in an area where you're going to solve the bandwidth problem with unique new ways. Pick it up to explain what you're working on, what's the project and what's the ambition. Yes, exactly. I think we fit really well in that concept of taking something that has a lot of heritage, reliability, we are very familiar with this technology. We've used it for more than 50 years. We like it and the problem with that technology has been that it's very expensive. It's not affordable. Not affordable to people like you and me such that that amount of bandwidth can actually be available to us. So what we have done is really focused on advanced materials and manufacturing techniques to make this new technology significantly more affordable. So like- And technology is? So we make power amplifiers that are based on TWTs. So TWTs are in amplifiers that actually like are currently being operated on the Voyager way back long time ago. It's a very old technology and we have taken it and really revamped it and looked at it differently and how can we make it the technology of the future? So we specifically operate in millimeter wave frequencies and at millimeter wave frequencies we can provide significantly more bandwidth than what you can do at lower frequencies. Okay, so the folks that aren't wireless though, what does millimeter wave mean? Millimeter wave is the amount of frequency that you have sort of in space. So the wavelength of that frequency is in millimeter range. So sort of the size of your nail or something like that, thickness of your nails. And so because of that, when you start operating at those frequencies you can send significantly more information, right? The frequencies that we use today are sort of on the order of, you know, centimeters, 10 centimeters, something like that, so about like this. And that doesn't allow you to send as much data as you can at these higher frequencies. So more bandwidth? Significantly more bandwidth. So the problem you're solving is taking something that's actually high bandwidth and has long ranges. Correct. Should bring it to the common price points to be deployed. That's right, that's right. So this particular technology allows you to generate enough power so you can send the data over long distances. So if you're on the ground you can create 40 plus kilometer links or you can send that information straight to space all the way to the geostations, right? So you actually have enough power to provide that amount of bandwidth. So the challenge has been is affordability which is what we have done is focus specifically is how do you reduce that cost? Well, I love anything that gives me more bandwidth. No one ever went out of business for providing more bandwidth. Let me do the app. The then monopolies. Talk about how you got here. What was the origination story? You work at Slack, not confused with Slack as in the messaging application, the Stanford linear accelerator in technically Menlo Park, I think. It is in Menlo Park. It's in Menlo Park, not Palo Alto, okay, so. It's right on Cian Hill Road, right to Elm. Right on Cian Hill Road, it's all the VCs, I drive past it all the time. What's it like there? Was it like, were you guys working on this at Slack? Was it like something that you had a lot of interest in? Were you scratching this itch, so to speak? So this particular technology has many applications and so particle accelerators are one of the applications of this technology. So some of the users for particle accelerators are of course facilities like Slack where we do some amazing science but you can take that same particle accelerator and we use it for cancer treatment. So one technology doesn't just apply to one solution. I'm using it in my company for communications, right, and this is how it related to the work that I was doing at Slack. So at Slack, my focus was on materials and manufacturing of these particular devices and I really focused on what is fundamental limitation of how much power you can really pack into the size of the device. If you can really shrink the size of the device, what can you do? And that applies whether it's particle accelerators or these millimeter wave amplifiers that I'm working on today. And yes, Slack, without the K, yes, is a particle accelerator laboratory that's operated by Stanford for the Department of Energy. And all the geeks know about it. It's folklore, certainly in Silicon Valley. And I didn't even know they had the hidden tunnels behind in the mountains up there. They do, they do. All kinds of stuff up there. I think they're back to having tours so it's always worth visiting. Let me get a little camera crew in there. All right, let's talk about back to your opportunity there. How many people you have working for you? What's the funding status? Where are you in your journey? So I hired my first person last June and we're at 14 people today. We have just did the first close of our seed round. So we had our pre-seed round last year and we are sort of in the middle of our seed round right now. And the plan is to get to Series A sometime next year depending on sort of performance and when we are ready. So you're in product building mode right now. We actually are in product building mode. We have product delivery scheduled in the next few months. So you have customers ordering Apple Buyers? Yes, we actually have customer orders. What's the price point you're getting at? What's, because I could see people lining up for this. Well, so because of our focus on manufacturing, we are also attaching customer interest to volume. So it depends on whether you're buying 10 of them or a thousand of them. So the price point varies. Of course, so. Buying bulk, Amazon. Yeah, a lot of outposts out there potentially and you've got the telecoms, Edge, booming. Yes. They've got full blown data centers now at these. Would you speak just, you know, monopoles or, you know, truss towers? Well, so this is one of the advantages of having a wireless technology. If you're trying to put a location that's remote or even semi remote, for you to be able to put a fiber link at that spot is years, an enormous amount of investment. So you can get the same amount of data movement if you switch to technology like ours. And so, yeah, it's a great application for millimeter waves. So things are going good. You got orders. You got product being built. You're going to get through your seat. Soon to have series A. Next year, yeah. And so the next step for us is building a factory, which is we're sort of doing a planned low rate initial production, starting probably at the end of this year, trying to scale to sort of tens of units per week. And then after that, trying to get the factory that'll be able to do sort of 10 times that. But we are gauging that with a customer interest that we are matching the production to the demand. What's your current verticals that are most interested now? So our primary application space is communications and backhaul specifically. I think we're very well positioned to enter that market. It sort of the next focus is going to space. So actually being on the space vehicles. And but to do that, we have to go for the space qualification. So we have a team focusing on how to space qualify. It's all certifications, all kinds of security checks. Correct. So that will take a little bit of time. I think the earliest we'll get there is next year. And so, but there is a lot of interest and support from sort of current companies, the new space companies to sort of help move the technology faster. Otherwise you can't get access to something that's new, right? This space qualification takes a long time. I mean, Space Force, everyone I talked to here and all over the industry on NASA to Space Force, they want to move faster. They don't want to be perceived as that old, slow, antiquated systems. Yes. They want to be cooler and faster, but secure. Absolutely. Security is a huge deal right now. When that's one of the advantages that we provide, right? We are relying on a heritage technology and also because it's millimeter wave, it provides you a certain amount of security, right? Because it's much, much harder to intercept than anything else, right? Well, exciting news, congratulations. Thank you. If you want to take a minute to go plug for your startup, you're going to hire, what's the status? You mean for my new employees? Yeah, yeah, what are you looking for? Customers, what kind of customers are you looking to hire? Absolutely. Put a commercial out there for the company. Okay, so when it comes to customers, we are looking for people that are willing to move really fast as fast as we are moving and willing to actually consider something like millimeter wave for their backhaul applications. So starting at K-A-Band and all the way to W-Band frequencies. For those that are my customers, they will know exactly what I'm talking about. And so we are bringing a technology that's reliable and bringing their cost down by a factor of 10, meaning something that was half a million before is going to be significantly cheaper today and you could afford to actually buy a thousand. Smaller, faster, cheaper. Exactly, that's the thing. So when it comes to employees, so we are growing really fast and we have a very fun team that cares about people. So for example, we spend one hour every week to actually talk about growth and personal development as sort of part of our culture. It's something we are committed to is that you have to love what you do. And so when you come to work, you better be having fun. And so we are looking for people that are very techy but also sort of are human centered and are willing to make the world a better place, which is what sort of ELV is all about is making technology useful for people, when it comes to communications, making me and you connected or us connected to the rest of the world as we sit here. And more empathetic and connected, like just connected emotionally. Connected in both ways. Both ways, physical and emotional and more bandwidth, more connections. Right, and you can have that interaction to be significantly higher quality if you can actually recreate that environment. Can I work for you? Sounds like a great place. No. No, I'll stay with my day job, thanks. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Of course, thank you for hosting me. Okay, we're here at Remars. All the hot startups are here, technologists, it's kind of a geeky nerd show and it's really cool because it's industrial innovation and about space and all the cool things we love at theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.