Upper Eighth Pupil Launches Aerospace Venture

St Paul’s is proud of pupil Conrad (Upper Eighth), who has achieved remarkable success with Initium Aerospace, the engineering company he co-founded in June 2024. What began as a conversation about building a rocket quickly developed into a research project focused on redesigning small rocket engines. The Initium team now comprises nine members, including university students, graduates and associate professors. Conrad leads all engineering development, manages the engineering team, and has worked closely with Professor Martin Trusler at Imperial.

Early Funding and Expansion

At the earliest stage of startup funding, known as pre-seed, the company raised $500,000 to test its 5kN engine. Testing will take place in the United States, and the company is opening an office in San Francisco. Over the next six months, the team plans to raise a further $3 to $5 million to fund the full development and testing of the 25kN Genesis 1 engine, which will be used on the final launch vehicle.

Insight from the Founder

Pupils and staff had the opportunity to learn more about Conrad’s startup at a Q&A hosted by the Venture Society on Wednesday 28 January. Below is Conrad’s account of the venture so far:

“I founded Initium Aerospace with my partner Danny in June 2024. On his birthday, we started talking about engineering projects we had worked on in the past, and I said it would be cool to build a rocket. That conversation turned into a small research project. It became obvious that small rocket engines are fundamentally designed incorrectly. Almost everyone simply scales down large rocket engines, which rely on preburners. At small scales, this causes many problems, including excessive internal heating, soot build-up, ignition complexity, tight propellant margins, and engines that are fragile, expensive and difficult to reuse.

Looking at this, we came up with the idea of a peroxide-driven turbopump cycle. Instead of using a preburner or electric motor, we decompose hydrogen peroxide over a catalyst to drive the turbopump. That gas is then fed directly into the combustion chamber as the oxidiser, where it ignites the fuel on contact. This approach is simpler, involves less internal heat stress, and avoids most of the scaling issues.

We realised the idea had commercial potential. Demand for small satellites is growing very fast, but most operators are still forced into rideshare launches because dedicated small launches are too expensive. With our technology, we can offer dedicated launches at a quarter of the current market price, comparable to SpaceX’s ridesharing prices. The business model is similar to Rocket Lab’s, but with better engines.

I lead all engineering development at Initium. I carry out hands-on work, including designing test set-ups and building decomposition models, manage the entire engineering team, and set the overall technical direction. I have worked closely with Professor Martin Trusler at Imperial on decomposition modelling for the catalyst. Today, Initium has a team of nine, including university students, graduates, associate professors, and people with over a decade of experience in the industry.

We are using our $500k pre-seed round to run a full hot-fire test of our 5kN engine. This will take place in the United States at a test site we are renting in the Mojave Desert. We are currently opening an office in San Francisco and hiring a full-time engineer there to support development. In the next six months, we plan to raise another round of $3 to $5 million to fund the full development and testing of the 25kN Genesis 1 engine, which will be used on the final launch vehicle.”