Our Founders and Story.

lan Cinnamon, CEO, and Max Benassi, CTO, came together in 2022 to solve the space industry's greatest need: spacecraft platforms. They set out to be a repeatable and reliable supplier of satellite buses, enabling tomorrow's constellations. lan and Max bring together a diverse set of experiences across aerospace and software, making Apex uniquely capable of delivering reliable spacecraft faster than ever and at scale. Under their leadership, Apex grows at lightning speeds - from clean sheet design to first flight planned in just a single year.


Before Apex, lan founded Synapse, an Al platform company that analyzed dual-use data, including downstream satellite imagery. After selling Synapse to Palantir, lan led satellite analysis efforts, where he saw first-hand the problems caused by long lead satellite bus vendors. In 2021, Ian joined the venture capital firm Village Global to invest in space companies while incubating the idea for Apex.


Max, our CTO, spent most of his career at SpaceX, where he applied design-for-manufacturing philosophies to over 500 different subassemblies. He worked to ensure SpaceX could increase its production rate to meet industry demand for launches. After realizing that rockets were no longer the bottleneck in the industry, Max joined Astra as Director of Engineering to solve the new bottleneck, scaling the production of satellite components