Michael Markesbery on Oros Labs, Aerogel & a $22M Series B

Full Transcript

Jason Kirby: Welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. I'm your host, Jason Kirby, and today we have Michael Marksberry with us, co‑founder and CEO of Auro's Lab on the show with us today. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Markesbery: Jason, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Jason Kirby: Now I'm excited to have you on the show. You have a pretty interesting background building a deep tech material science company. But where I want to start is I just want to know what your story is. How did you go from building a direct‑to‑consumer apparel brand to what you now call a material science company that's raised over $50 million? Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what your journey has been like.

Michael Markesbery: Sure. My story's pretty simple. Again, I'm Michael, co‑founder and CEO of Oros Labs. When I was in college, I backpacked across Europe and ended up climbing my first mountain in the Swiss Alps. Incredible experience, but one big problem: I looked like the Michelin Man on top of the mountain.

Michael Markesbery: I remember thinking, this makes no sense. There's gotta be a better way to cut bulk and still stay warm. So I came back to the US and with a friend, Ritvik Venna—now co‑founder and COO—we started looking into insulation. Not just apparel, but everything from buildings to aerospace to cold‑chain packaging, batteries—trying to solve the Michelin Man problem I had on the mountain. What surprised us: other industries faced the same challenge as apparel.

Michael Markesbery: For example, we're both in a building right now. Half the world's energy consumption—trillions of dollars a year—goes to producing heat. The largest consumer of that heat? Buildings and structures. If you improve insulation in buildings by just a few percentage points, you save tens—if not hundreds—of billions of dollars annually. Cold‑chain packaging: we ship so much medication globally, especially during COVID. Much of it is temperature‑sensitive. We throw out around $35 billion of temperature‑sensitive medication a year because we can't keep it cold enough or long enough in transport. Aerospace, batteries, defense—same theme.

Michael Markesbery: The point: Rith and I realized the problem isn't apparel—it's insulation. If we can solve insulation, we can impact many markets. I then got lucky and received the Astronaut Scholarship, created by the Mercury 7 astronauts. Through that, we learned about aerogel—an amazing insulation NASA uses on spacecraft, like the Mars rovers. Aerogel is the lowest thermal conductive solid we know—meaning it's the best insulation known.

Michael Markesbery: We thought: if it's the best insulation and used in space, why isn't it used everywhere else? We got our hands on aerogel and learned why: it's super brittle. Put it in your hands and it shatters into a thousand pieces. We became obsessed with making this amazing insulation flexible and durable enough for any application. That launched Oros Labs. That's my story in brief.

Jason Kirby: So NASA‑inspired insulation, but too brittle to commercialize—and you made it commercial. Did you start selling your own consumer apparel with that product and then move into industrial and commercial?

Michael Markesbery: Absolutely—you nailed it. We created the world's first flexible and durable aerogel composite called SolarCore Foam. We were fortunate to get patents and validated it against over 400 other insulations—haven't found anything more insulating. The real value proposition: every insulation today needs loft and bulk to work. That's why jackets are puffy and walls have bulky fiberglass. Compress them and they lose insulating ability because they rely on airspace. That's not true with aerogel—and therefore not true with SolarCore. For the first time, a thin amount of insulation can deliver meaningful thermal value.

Michael Markesbery: Once we created the technology, we needed awareness. One of the best ways was to create a consumer apparel brand—Oros Apparel—an outdoor brand centered on SolarCore to generate awareness around the platform. That was how we built awareness and traction across our three target industries: consumer, commercial, and government. You nailed it.

Jason Kirby: How did you get that started? You're doing deep‑tech, inventing a new material. How did you raise money and get the initial consumer product to market?

Michael Markesbery: We started as two founders in a college dorm room in Oxford, Ohio, with money from the Astronaut Scholarship—and that was it. We tinkered for two years, from sophomore to senior year, to figure out how to make aerogel not brittle. Once we figured that out, the next step was turning it into a product and validating demand. For funding, we launched via a Kickstarter. Our goal was $100k. We said, if we hit $100k, that's validation to pursue this after college. In the first 36 hours we hit ~$125k and closed at ~$360k. That gave us capital and traction to raise an institutional round.

Jason Kirby: So a few hundred grand on Kickstarter, momentum, then go‑to‑market with the apparel brand around SolarCore. What was the journey and timeline to attracting institutional investors to ultimately raise over $50M in ~9–10 years?

Michael Markesbery: Our first round was ~$2M (seed) right after we graduated—about six months post‑Kickstarter. I don't think we'd have been as successful without that traction. As for the process: two science geeks with an entrepreneurship minor—we knew nothing about fundraising. We were fortunate to have advisors and mentors who guided us.

Jason Kirby: So successful Kickstarter to mentorship and advisors guiding you to a $2M seed round—around 2015–2016. At what point did you realize the bigger opportunity beyond DTC—going after the insulation market, licensing the apparel brand, and focusing on commercial/industrial?

Michael Markesbery: From the beginning, our thesis was to transform insulation cross‑functionally across three industries: consumer (esp. footwear/apparel), commercial (aerospace, cold‑chain, batteries, buildings), and government (largely DoD). We created the apparel brand to generate awareness and then sell SolarCore within those industries. It worked—we garnered traction: signed our first consumer brands (e.g., L.L. Bean, Merrell), first commercial partners, and first government contracts—largely due to awareness from Oros Apparel. Once we had that traction, we went 100% into material sales across those industries.

Jason Kirby: What year was that transition?

Michael Markesbery: 2023—we licensed the apparel brand to a PE firm and focused 100% of our energy on materials and technology.

Jason Kirby: That coincides with a sizable recent raise. Give us the capital‑raising history: $2M seed eight–nine years ago—what else and when?

Michael Markesbery: We've raised a little over $50M in equity to date. The most recent round was April 2024: a $22M Series B led by Airbus Ventures. Prior rounds—Seed, Seed+, and Series A—totaled ~$28M.

Jason Kirby: When was your Series A?

Michael Markesbery: 2021.

Jason Kirby: Had you started generating revenue on the commercial or government side at that point?

Michael Markesbery: Yes—that's when we had initial traction across all three; some more meaningful than others, but traction across government and commercial was underway.

Jason Kirby: Many listeners are in software or consumer. Let’s dig into deep‑tech operations. Are you manufacturing—building facilities and equipment—or outsourcing? And where is the raised capital going?

Michael Markesbery: We had two choices: in‑house manufacturing or contract manufacturing. We chose contract manufacturing for immense, rapid scale and revenue growth without heavy capex and time. That’s oversimplified, because we had to focus on process engineering to make our tech easy to contract‑manufacture on existing foam lines—no major capex for partners. That took a lot of work but enables rapid scaling. Will we always contract‑manufacture? Debatable—the downside is gross margin. Bringing it in‑house recaptures those points, so it's a future trade‑off.

Jason Kirby: Right—you reach scale, run the math, and maybe insource. But it’s a huge capex lift—like Tesla building everything in‑house; it took time and money to reach that scale.

Michael Markesbery: Absolutely—that’s the equation.

Jason Kirby: On contract manufacturing: are you hiring engineers to solve the process problems and then hand instructions to partners, or relying on partners?

Michael Markesbery: The former. Creation is our core: we create novel thermal insulation solutions and sell them to partners. That includes the process engineering to make and scale it. Our team spans chemical, mechanical, and textile engineers who lead that work.

Jason Kirby: SolarCore goes into apparel, tents, buildings, trucks, delivery—anything that needs temperature control. Is the material one‑size‑fits‑all that you size for customers, or do you need different processes per application? In what form do customers get it? And how does sales work—do you have a team educating on benefits, cost savings, and performance?

Michael Markesbery: Our goal: make adoption as easy as possible. Our first technology is SolarCore Foam—a composite of foam and aerogel. You get foam’s flexibility and durability with aerogel’s insulation—the best of both worlds. That was our first patent. Most industries we serve already used foam insulation. So customers can swap their existing foam with SolarCore Foam—no change to their manufacturing or assembly—yet they get the performance benefits without bulk.

Jason Kirby: Pricing—application‑based, value‑based, cost‑plus? How do you think about it?

Michael Markesbery: We’re upper‑middle‑market: premium, not luxury. There are more expensive insulations (e.g., goose down, VIPs) and cheaper ones (generic polyfills). Cross‑functionally, we beat them on thermal performance and thinness. Historically, aerogels are very expensive, so we focused heavily on cost engineering to make SolarCore price‑competitive as well as process‑friendly.

Jason Kirby: Government is a different animal. How did you break in—get approved as a vendor and sell into the DoD? Did you hire the right talent or do it yourselves?

Michael Markesbery: We knew it was the right market, but we didn’t know how to work with government. So first we brought in advisors with deep gov expertise. Guided by them, we hired a consultancy focused on DoD contracts, which helped land initial programs—cold‑weather apparel, tactical shelters, pipe insulation. As those grew toward procurement, we built an internal team and hired our Head of Government, Dale Suzuki, who’s been in that industry his whole career, and built out the team with him.

Jason Kirby: Essentially: find the market, acknowledge your gaps, and bring in the right talent. Switching to your most recent round—by then you had traction and awareness. When did you decide to raise, and what was the process?

Michael Markesbery: We kicked off in 2023. From first pitch to close took ~12 months—longer than the ~9‑month “standard.” The climate was tougher in 2023. Our philosophy: value‑add capital. All money is green, but we wanted entities that could help us scale. That’s reflected in the cap table: Airbus Ventures led; also REI’s venture arm; Goldwin’s venture arm (largest outdoor apparel conglomerate in Japan); Crumpton Ventures (founded by Hank Crumpton, former Deputy Director of the CIA); In‑Q‑Tel; and others—all aligned with value‑add.

Jason Kirby: How did you get in front of those investors—cold emails or warm intros via advisors?

Michael Markesbery: A surgical approach. Sometimes we got lucky with intros (e.g., Crumpton Ventures). Mostly: we mapped similar companies, identified who funded them, screened for value‑add, tiered the target list, then cross‑referenced partners on LinkedIn to find mutual connections for warm intros. Warm intros generally outperform cold emails. That’s how we kicked off conversations.

Jason Kirby: Many relationships were brand‑new. There’s a misconception you can raise in a month. Even for venture‑scale businesses, it takes time—especially in 2023 for Series B. From your first meeting with, say, Airbus Ventures to a term sheet, how many touchpoints?

Michael Markesbery: Easily over a dozen meaningful touchpoints, plus many smaller ones (texts, quick calls) before commitment.

Jason Kirby: Founders often expect an intro meeting, a data‑room dive, then a term sheet. It rarely works that way. Kudos for being surgical, planning for a long process, and managing runway. What’s your advice to founders in deep tech or adjacent spaces?

Michael Markesbery: You summarized the key takeaways: leave meaningful runway before raising; be surgical and thoughtful. What we’d do better: foster relationships early—even before a formal raise. It saves time and helps you know your partners.

Jason Kirby: Agreed—wise advice, especially given 2023’s tougher market for later stages. For founders who want to learn more about you and Oros Labs, where should they go?

Michael Markesbery: Our website is aureoslabs.com. My email is michael@solarcore.tech—feel free to reach out—or find us on LinkedIn.

Jason Kirby: Be thoughtful with outreach—personalize, don’t spam. Michael, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. We’ll include the links in the description below.

Michael Markesbery: Jason, thanks for having me. It’s been an absolute blast.

Jason Kirby: All right.