Forerunner AI
Copilot for aerospace engineers making rockets, munitions, satellites
Forerunner is your aerospace, defense, and hardware engineering copilot, helping you beat tight deadlines by automating critical engineering workflows. Our secure AI agents access data from tools like Atlassian Suite and Microsoft Office, then collaborate with hardware engineers to accelerate design and analysis.
Active Founders
Yash Kadadi, Founder
Prev. Software/Autonomy/ML at Anduril, SpaceX, and NASA | Stanford BS CS '25, MS CS '26 (on leave)
Will Nida, Founder
Stanford BS '25 (Physics + CS). Prev. Starship Propulsion Engineering @ SpaceX, Plasma Propulsion Research @ Stanford
Company Launches
BLUF
Forerunner automates repetitive hardware engineering tasks, helping hardware teams speed up design iterations and stay aligned. Our AI-powered Slackbot integrates with software like Confluence and GitHub, enabling engineers to efficiently access the latest data (“What’s the current thrust on our Methalox engine?”), run calculations (“Solve for mass flow rate on the cold gas thruster”), and update files (“Update SRB design thrust with new test data”).
With Forerunner, engineers can focus on what matters: designing and building hardware systems.
The Ask – Refer Us
We’d like to chat with any engineering leads at aerospace, defense, and hardware companies!
Email yash@tryforerunner.com if you or your friends are building cool hardware!
Who we are
We’re Yash and Will! We’re lifelong aerospace nerds. We’ve launched liquid biprop rockets and built CubeSats at Stanford, and we have deployed hardware and software at SpaceX (Starship and Starlink), Anduril (Altius), and NASA (ISS operations).
Why this matters
An FPV drone carrying a warhead disables Russian armor. Credit: United24
The world is on fire, and we desperately need to fly the next generation of autonomous weapons, satellites, launch vehicles, hypersonics, and eVTOL aircraft.
However, inefficient engineering software is slowing us down. We personally experienced the frustration of digging through hundreds of slides of primary structures analysis, setting up Excel hand-calcs with equations from Roark’s, and missing flight deadlines.
To accelerate the development of critical aerospace and defense hardware, we need to automate slow, tedious workflows for engineers.
How we solve this
Forerunner automates repetitive tasks in aerospace engineering. Today, Forerunner can:
- Update turbopump design specs in Document A by querying and synthesizing test results from Documents B and C.
- Size the mass budget for a comms satellite using techniques in The New SMAD. Generate compliant test plans based on Air Force Space Command procedures.
- Analyze assembly instructions for an arming fuse and generate an inspection plan for QA.
- Track system-level requirements for a loitering munition; when new wingbox subsystem specs are uploaded, Forerunner flags and corrects any inconsistencies with system requirements.
