Interview
Revel: The $1B Startup Rewriting Hardware Control
- Scott Morton founded Revel, a 15-month-old platform designed to control and test complex hardware systems, after identifying a "brain drain" in software engineering for legacy industries.
- Revel recently secured a $150 million Series A round, bringing its total raised capital to $180 million with a post-money valuation of $1,005,000,000.
- The Series A was led by Index Ventures, with significant participation from Redpoint; the seed round was co-led by Felicis, with Mayvi Thriver and Redpoint also participating.
- The company addresses the obsolescence of control software tools developed in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., LabVIEW, National Instruments, Structured Text) which lack modern engineering workflows.
- Revel's platform enables customers to increase testing frequency by 5x to 10x; a primary deployment at Impulse moved their rocket engine testing from once every other day to multiple times daily.
- The platform reduces reliance on specialized legacy engineers by allowing generalists and interns to configure and write control software within minutes, as demonstrated by an intern's rapid adoption at Impulse.
- Scott Morton spent nine years at SpaceX, where he witnessed the necessity of building new infrastructure from scratch due to the bottlenecks of decade-old software tools.
- His experience managing high-consequence systems, such as the Falcon 9 "Load and Go" propellant loading sequence, informed the need for modern tools that minimize the risk of catastrophic failure during operations.
- Revel's product strategy includes two distinct verticals: "Revel Test" for general aerospace, automotive, and industrial control testing, and "Revel C2" (Command and Control) for high-availability systems used in nuclear and energy sectors.
- Current enterprise customers include Impulse (rocket engines), Astromechanica (jet engines), K2 Space (satellites), and Radiant (small modular reactors).
- Morton cites early-stage Starship teams as a key inspiration for Revel's ability to enable small groups to make rapid decisions without heavy bureaucracy.
- The company is currently executing approximately 1,000 pilot deployments, with a 100% conversion rate from pilot to paid customer.
- Scott Morton credits Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) as a key mentor, citing Figma's approach to democratizing design as an analog for Revel's strategy of lowering barriers for hardware control engineers.
- The team aims to scale indefinitely to complete their mission, targeting rapid-moving startups and large-scale scaling enterprises in defense, energy, and aviation.
- Forward-looking plans include expanding into wastewater treatment infrastructure and securing partnerships with major industrial energy players like ExxonMobil.
- A specific technical innovation derived from the Starship experience is the ability to "hot stage" (ignite engines while attached), which required novel control software solutions that Revel aims to generalize for the broader market.