Instinct

Building lunar landers

Y CombinatorWinter 2025ActiveIndustrialsAviation and Space

What they do

Problem

Access to the Moon is expensive and infrequent, limiting payload delivery and lunar mission cadence.

Solution

Instinct builds small lunar landers that can launch on standard LEO rideshares and transfer payloads to the Moon at lower cost and higher frequency.

Who it's for

Organizations needing to deliver payloads to the lunar surface, such as space agencies, commercial space companies, and research institutions.

Founders

Alex Pinel Neparidze

Founder

Building lunar landers. Co-CEO of Instinct. Graduate in Space Engineering at UCL and Aerospace engineering at QMUL. At Open Cosmos, he worked in project management on the PHISAT-2 and HAMMER Earth observation satellites, both launched in 2024 and now in orbit. Published research on the usage of machine learning for detecting Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

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Joaquim Dickson

Founder

Building lunar landers. CTO at Instinct. Studied Physics at Imperial College London and Space Technology at UCL. Worked on the magnetometer (MAG) for NASA's IMAP spacecraft with Imperial's Fluxgate Magnetometer Laboratory. Also worked on the Solar Wind Analyser (SWA) instrument suite aboard ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft with UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

Ashwin Iyer

Founder

Building rideshare compatible lunar landers. Ashwin is the co-founder and co-CEO of Instinct. He studied mechanical engineering at QMUL in London and holds a Master in Industrial Systems, Manufacturing and Management from the University of Cambridge. Ashwin has also worked at Imperial College London, researching Rolls Royce jet engines as well as undertaken consulting projects as part of a team at Cambridge across a variety of industries including Venture capital, Metalworking and Electronics.