🅰️ncap @ancapspace

The Honeywell Aerospace / Shield AI MOU is going around as a $MRLN killer. My thoughts : • The MOU is defense first. Honeywell “will develop” a trusted autonomy stack on Shield AI’s Hivemind SDK using its Anthem avionics. On commercial aviation the language is “will explore the architecture required.” That is a study, not a program. • Different certificate entirely. Hivemind flies V-BAT and X-BAT, both uncrewed. Merlin is a reduced-crew system on a Part 23 certificated airplane with a pilot in the seat. • Shield AI is at the bottom of the cert ladder. They are recruiting an Airworthiness Engineering Director to define strategy in environments their own job posting calls “ill-defined or evolving.” • Merlin is already being audited against one. SOI-3 cleared August 6, AI issue paper closed with the FAA the same week. • Honeywell flies its own testbed. N170EH, Embraer ERJ 170-100 LR, serial 17000059, registered to Honeywell Aerospace US LLC in Phoenix. Classification Experimental. Category Research and Development, Market Survey. Airworthiness date April 24, three months before the MOU. That last one is the part worth your attention. A 70-seat regional jet on the same class of experimental certificate Merlin’s Caravans fly on, owned outright, with no partner named on it. Honeywell is selling the certified trust layer to whoever walks in and testing on its own airframe while it does. The certificate is the moat. Merlin is further up that ladder than anyone else in this story, and a partnership headline does not move anyone up it.

Alexander @AlexfromBabylon

a day ago

$MRLN Seems well funded competition is entering this space! For those still holding this is definitely an item to watch!

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@thekookreport @ASTS_SpaceMob But why make it hard? Can't we just go directly to $1500 without all this stress?

Merlin is hiring. View our 20+ open roles and join us in building the operating system of record for autonomous flight. merlinlabs.com/careers/

@ShawarmaCapital Are you 1000% bearish now? 😁

$MRLN Two different things get called “autopilot.” What's in every airliner today: holds altitude, speed, heading. Cruise control, no lane keeping. A human still flies. What I flew on yesterday: the system flies the airplane. Waypoints, Voice-control, ATC comms, bounds, etc. Having now flown on real aircraft autonomy: that gap is bigger than cruise control → Cybercab. Immensely.

Shawarma Capital @ShawarmaCapital

a week ago

$MRLN Can confirm, the tech is real. Autonomous take off, flight, and landing on steroids. ✈️

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$MRLN Can confirm, the tech is real. Autonomous take off, flight, and landing on steroids. ✈️

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$MRLN Board Of Directors Overview Matt George, Founder, Chairman & CEO Last one — the man who built the whole thing. He nearly hit a JetBlue plane on a grass strip in Vermont. That near miss became the reason Merlin exists. BACKGROUND He didn't study aerospace. Didn't study engineering, or computer science, or anything that looks, on paper, like a path to founding an autonomous aviation company. Biology at Middlebury College, in Vermont. Paramedic school at Texas A&M, a discipline built entirely around high stakes decisions with zero margin for error. An internship at the White House during college, working healthcare and data analytics in the Executive Office of the President. None of it looks like aerospace. All of it built the toolkit. Biology gave him a systems level lens. Paramedicine gave him a framework for operating where mistakes are irreversible. The White House gave him data as a tool for solving institutional scale problems. He learned to fly in college, on small tail dragging planes out of grass strip airports. One day, he nearly hit a JetBlue plane. Most fatal aviation accidents, he realized, aren't mechanical. They're not weather. They're human. Tired pilots, distracted pilots. THE TRACK RECORD First company: Bridj, a demand based bus company in Boston. Move the bus stop to the rider instead of the other way around. The MBTA noticed. Kansas City signed a pilot. George was 23, calling it "ours to lose." Funding talks with a car manufacturer fell apart, and Bridj shut down in 2017. He was 26. He didn't stop. He went and watched the second generation of autonomous driving companies up close, Zoox, Waymo, Cruise, and came away with two convictions: autonomy is genuinely hard, and autonomy is still the future. The problem with ground autonomy, as he saw it: you can't generate revenue until the safety driver is gone entirely. It's all or nothing, and it costs tens of billions of dollars to find out. He went looking for an environment where you could go from two humans to one and have that step alone be worth billions. He kept landing on the same answer. The sky. Founded Merlin in 2018. First hardware: a cheap canard pusher aircraft, a few thousand dollars, computers cooled with dry ice and duct tape. He brought military customers to see it anyway, what he calls "D minus work," showing up unfinished because the feedback matters more than the polish. USSOCOM kept coming back. During the seed round, he bet investor Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital his own right kidney that Merlin would hit $1 million in defense revenue before the round closed. He won. THE FINE PRINT Bridj didn't work out. He was 26, the company shut down, and the Boston Globe wrote it up under a headline about moving too fast. Most founders would call that a low point. He's talked about it openly since, not as a redemption arc, just as the thing that came before this. Building a company at 23, watching it end at 26, and going straight back out to figure out what to try next isn't a clean résumé line. It's a real one. WHERE MERLIN STANDS TODAY 800+ autonomous flight hours across five aircraft types. 500+ autonomous missions. A $105 million IDIQ with USSOCOM for the C-130J program, Critical Design Review completed June 4, 2026, moving the program from design into aircraft integration and flight testing. An agreement with the Air Force for autonomous capabilities in contested environments. Dual track civil certification with the FAA and New Zealand's CAA. Partnerships with Northrop Grumman, GE Aerospace, and Honeywell. And a problem nobody else in the space has solved: autonomous ATC communication, built from scratch rather than off a general purpose model, because a wrong readback doesn't get a second chance. When Merlin went public via de-SPAC in March 2026, George rolled 100% of his equity, held the largest individual stake in the company, and took a strict six month lockup. No selling, no hedging. The stock fell 62% on its first day of trading. He'd deliberately sat out the 2020 to 2021 SPAC frenzy, waiting until Merlin had real contracts and real flight hours before going public at all. THE BOARD A newly public board gets seated through the merger agreement and a shareholder vote, not picked by the CEO alone. But as founder, Chairman, and the company's largest shareholder, George had real say in who ended up in that room. A former Secretary of the Navy. A former Blue Origin CEO. Amazon's first Chief Accounting Officer. A former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force who ran a $120 billion budget. A co founder of Brazil's largest airline. A hedge fund founder who helped put the first commercial company on the Moon. Six other directors, six very different careers, all sitting around the same table with him now. $MRLN ✈️

But I thought people said that SpaceX $SPCX would prioritize Starlink launches & defer customers… Looks like there are several available slots for the likes of AST $ASTS & Amazon $AMZN near term The ER comments about not relying on BO to get to 45 & having 10 launches booked makes a lot of sense now

Lukas C. H. @GewoonLukas_

a week ago

This morning's Starlink launch, Starlink Group 10-49, was the final planned Starlink launch on Falcon 9 from Florida. Future Starlink launches out of the East Coast will launch on Starship, and SLC-40 will only be supporting customer launches from now on. 🫡

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@Busybissm @AbelAvellan @AST_SpaceMobile $asts Did you take into consideration that Falcon-9 will stop launching Starlink satellites and they will only use Falcon-9 for paying customers, that freeing up launch capacity? No you didn't.

@StephenEllis_PR Why dilution? They have enough cash for 100 sats. By then the taps are open.

@Davidrejll @dmeinvestor If you call AST vaporware, then clearly you have no clue.

@AretardInvestor @dmeinvestor When $ASTS service starts and serious cash flow starts, then it's too late. So there will be a re-rating between now and Q2. The re-rating will be pretty huge.

@Davidrejll @dmeinvestor 👆 How to show people you have no clue.

@moinvests28 $mrln

@spacanpanman @kgb16133794 I did touch some grass inbetween all the granite.

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Merlin Stock Is Priced Like The Technology Doesn’t Work Merlin $MRLN closed yesterday at $4.16 a share, down significantly from its $10 SPAC price, valuing the company at roughly $400 million on an undiluted basis. Add in the preferred stock and warrants still outstanding, and the fully diluted ceiling sits closer to $1 billion, if everything eventually converts. That’s a maximum scenario, not a certainty. What’s real right now is simpler: the planes are flying, the certification is progressing, and the market is pricing this like none of it matters yet. One Government Contract Is Already Real Revenue Q1 2026 revenue was roughly $1.0 million, recognized under the USSOCOM C-130J IDIQ as task orders get funded against a $105 million ceiling. That’s a real, funded contract with the U.S. government, on the aircraft flown by the country’s most elite special operations units. Revenue moves on procurement timing, not a smooth curve, so a quiet quarter here isn’t a red flag. It’s the government moving at government speed while a $105 million ceiling sits there waiting to convert. The Commercial Story Is Just Getting Started Merlin’s civil aviation ambitions are stacking up fast. The Condor product line. A new MoU with Israel Aerospace Industries. An earlier agreement with World Star Aviation. None of these are signed commercial deals yet, they’re early collaborations laying groundwork toward one. But the retrofit thesis for cargo carriers is real: pilot shortages are structural, operating costs are rising, and Merlin is the company positioning to solve both without needing a single new airframe built. This is the part of the story that hasn’t shown up in the stock price at all. The Cash Position Gives Them Real Runway Cash sat at $183 million after May financing, with no debt. That’s real staying power while certification and commercial deals mature. One thing worth watching: 21.7 million shares of Series A Preferred carry a cumulative dividend, working out to roughly $6.5-7.8 million a quarter depending on how it’s settled. It won’t show up in adjusted EBITDA, so I’ll be listening for how management addresses it directly on the call rather than assuming the worst. Certification Is Moving Faster Than Most Investors Realize SOI-1 and SOI-2 are complete with New Zealand’s CAA and the FAA. SOI-3 was achieved August 6, covering the Flight Control Computer and the AI-driven ATC communication system, arguably the hardest unsolved problem in autonomous aviation. SOI-4 and full certification are still ahead, but this is a company clearing regulatory milestones years ahead of where most of the market assumes they are. That cadence is the real moat here, more than any single quarter’s revenue. What Would Make Today’s $4.50 Look Like A Gift In Hindsight If task-order funding accelerates against that $105 million ceiling and certification keeps this pace, this price becomes very hard to justify in six months. $MRLN reports Q2 earnings after market close today. I’m watching task-order funding, how the preferred gets settled, and whether there’s a timeline for SOI-4. Genuinely excited to see where this goes. I believe the sky is the limit ✈️

$mrln Awesome space

Shawarma Capital @ShawarmaCapital

3 weeks ago

x.com/i/spaces/1jGXg…

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@ASTS_Investors An easy $50B deal in the making.

@ShawarmaCapital @spacanpanman Ping him a message.