A SpaceX vet raised $65M to pull wire harnesses out of the Cold War era
When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the...
Key points
- When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket.
- “I traveled all over the world to go visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month.
- While Black couldn’t disclose customers, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles, to defense vehicle systems on land, to launch vehicles, to satellites.” If it doesn’t sound immediately important, consider a recent wire harness disaster.
- Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize the inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program.
What happened
When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket. “I traveled all over the world to go visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. While Black couldn’t disclose customers, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles, to defense vehicle systems on land, to launch vehicles, to satellites.” If it doesn’t sound immediately important, consider a recent wire harness disaster. Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize the inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. “It goes back to the Elon principle of, ‘automation is last,’” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on it now, but a lot of it the standardization and the foundation building that made SpaceX be able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they do hundreds a year.” Senra — which, by the way, is...