Marc Verstaen
Paul Day
Loft Orbital Solutions, a provider of Space Infrastructure as a Service, announces the appointments of two of the industry’s technology and satellite industry veterans, Paul Day and Marc Verstaen. This news follows on the heels of its $13M Series A round, to which these executives will further Loft Orbital’s goals of making access to space simple, fast, and reliable.
Paul Day, previously a hardware program manager at Apple Special Projects as well as an early employee and program manager at Skybox Imaging, has joined Loft Orbital as Chief Product Officer. He ran manufacturing and launch for Skybox’s first- and second-generation Skysats including setting up the manufacturing line with Skybox satellite manufacturing partner Space Systems Loral, until the company was acquired by Google for $500M in 2014. At Loft Paul will own the satellite mission execution side of the company, building the internal processes and third party relationships to support large-scale and rapid constellation deployments.
Day commented that having known the Loft team since the company’s early days, he’s been impressed with the speed by which the company has built significant traction with a wide range of commercial and government customers. He’s excited to come onboard and help Loft industrialize its mission execution processes to meet that demand.
Marc Verstaen joins Loft Orbital as its Vice President of Engineering. Marc is a seasoned technology leader with a proven track record of building world-class software teams. He was previously EVP of Product Development and Board member at Docker, and a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple. Marc has also co-founded multiple companies, including one that was acquired by Hyperion Solutions, and he is responsible for building and scaling Loft Orbital’s software teams and shipping software that supports the company’s satellite missions.
Verstaen said that he is lucky enough to have been part of two revolutions, with the iOS team at Apple making phones simple, and at Docker, making containers simple. He believes Loft will allow him to be part of a third revolution — making space simple.
Loft Orbital provides an end-to-end service for flying and operating customer payloads. The company has developed a suite of hardware and software products that enables it to rideshare any type of payload onboard standard, flight-proven, 100kg-class satellite buses, while providing customers with the ability to task their payload.
Antoine de Chassy, co-founder and co-CEO of Loft Orbital stated that Loft Orbital continues to bring on world class talent from both the technology and satellite realms, and they have built a culture that incorporates the best of both worlds.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour, co-founder and Co-CEO added that as their business grows in technical, programmatic, and organizational complexity, now is the perfect time to expand their leadership team. The addition of Marc and Paul to their team gives them the shoulders to scale their operations and address the massive demand they are experiencing from increasingly sophisticated customers.
Marc and Paul join Loft’s leadership team, joining a slate of executives including Pieter van Duijn (CTO); Lucas Brémond, Chief Architect; Andrew Berg (VP Business Development) and John Eterno (VP, Missions).
