Why the Winner of Startup World Cup Santa Cruz Wants to Turn Off Gravity

Written By Doug & Claude

g-SPACE, the Startup World Cup Santa Cruz Regional champion, uses physics and AI to show companies what happens when gravity disappears, before they spend a fortune launching anything into orbit.

Let's start with something you've never once thanked: gravity.

Gravity is great. It keeps your coffee in the mug and the Pacific in its basin. But if you're trying to make something extremely precise, like a fiber optic strand, a pharmaceutical crystal, or a tiny lab-grown human organ, gravity becomes that one coworker who keeps "helping."

Here's what it does. When you melt, mix, or grow something on Earth, the heavy bits sink, the light bits rise, and warm stuff swirls around in convection currents. Scientists call the results defects. I call them gravity's fingerprints, and they're on everything we make.

Now remove gravity.

Suddenly everything just… sits there, calmly. Molecules spread out evenly through pure diffusion. Nothing sinks and nothing swirls. You get more uniform structures, better materials, and happier cells.

So the obvious move is to make stuff in space. Problem solved!

Except (and this is a BIG exception) flying an experiment to orbit costs a small fortune, and most companies have no idea whether their particular process will actually improve up there, how many flights they actually need, or whether the improvements will justify the cost and scale into a viable business. Without that knowledge, every flight is a very expensive coin toss.

Enter Ioana Cozmuta.

Ioana is a PhD physicist who spent 15 years at NASA, much of it working to commercialize the International Space Station. Along the way she noticed a gap the size of a launch pad. NASA had decades of microgravity research, and industry had product roadmaps, but the two were barely on speaking terms. So she pushed for funding lines, organized industry workshops, and then founded a startup that actually manufactured fiber optics in microgravity. She has done the thing.

Her big lesson is that space manufacturing isn't about shrinking your factory and strapping it to a rocket. It's about understanding the physics.

That's g-SPACE.

g-SPACE is a physics-based design platform. Plenty of AI tools help companies optimize experiments. g-SPACE adds the variable nobody else models: what happens when gravity drops to zero, or lands somewhere in between. Before a company flies, g-SPACE tells it whether its process benefits from microgravity and how many flights it will take to get there. Sometimes that's one flight, sometimes four. Either way, it beats trial and error followed by a millions of dollars  invoice from a launch provider.

So what actually changes without gravity?

Biotech. Organoids, the miniature lab-grown organs used in drug testing, face a frustrating trade-off on Earth. Grow them big and they lose viability. Keep them viable and they stay small. In microgravity, they can be both.

Pharma. Many drugs depend on a delicate shift from an amorphous form to a crystalline one. Gravity disrupts it. Remove gravity and formulations become more stable.

Materials. Better fiber optics, plus high-performance magnetic materials made without rare earths, which, given today's rare-earth supply chains, is a Very Big Deal.

Then there's the bonus round: the planet. Making glass and advanced materials on Earth burns enormous energy to create vacuums and cool things down. Space provides both for free, and a solar-powered orbital factory could sharply cut energy use and pollution.

On October 17 at The Catalyst, g-SPACE pitched all of this and walked away as Santa Cruz Regional Champion. Next stop is San Francisco, where the Santa Cruz Regional Champion will compete for a $1 million investment prize from Pegasus Tech Ventures.

Fresh off a pre-seed round in December, g-SPACE is raising again. Ioana is looking for visionary investors who see both the returns and the sustainability upside. She also wants pilot customers in biotech, pharma, or materials who want to know what their process could do without gravity. And she wants your vote, since g-SPACE is competing in Meet the Drapers, where social votes count.

Gravity has had a good run. g-SPACE thinks some of our best stuff should be made without it.

Related Articles

Doug & Claude
Next

Nominations Now Open: Santa Cruz Works Wavemaker Awards