Instinct Is Building Small Lunar Landers to Make the Moon the New LEO

Instinct, a Winter 2025 Y Combinator company, is betting that lunar access can look a lot like LEO access if someone is bold enough to engineer for it. For two decades, the story of space has been the collapse of the cost to low Earth orbit. Reusable launch vehicles, rideshare missions, and a new generation of smallsat operators have turned LEO from an exotic destination into industrial real estate. The next frontier is further out — and the economics that unlocked LEO are now being applied, deliberately, to the Moon.

Founded in 2024 by Alex Pinel Neparidze, Joaquim Dickson, and Ashwin Iyer, Instinct is building small lunar landers designed to be launched as regular LEO rideshare payloads. The engineering thesis is elegant: instead of waiting for a dedicated lunar mission — which is expensive, slow, and rare — a small, purpose-built lander can hitchhike on the already-frequent cadence of LEO rideshare launches and then use its own propulsion to reach lunar orbit and descend. The result is higher mission cadence at a lower cost, and over time, a standardized delivery service for payloads bound for the Moon. The company’s own phrasing captures the ambition: Instinct is making the Moon the new LEO.

The market opportunity, once niche, is quickly becoming strategic. National space agencies have committed to sustained lunar exploration, private lunar infrastructure — landers, rovers, communications relays — is on the near-term roadmap, and a growing set of science missions, resource-utilization experiments, and defense payloads all need reliable, low-cost transportation to the lunar surface. The bottleneck today is not demand but access: a handful of expensive missions a year cannot carry the cadence of experimentation that a real lunar economy requires. Instinct’s rideshare-first architecture is a direct response to that bottleneck.

Backed by Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch and operating with a founding team of four, Instinct is an unusually ambitious hardware play in a cohort dominated by AI application companies. That contrast is a feature, not a bug. The best deep-tech companies of the last decade — SpaceX, Relativity, Anduril — all began with small teams making engineering bets that the broader market dismissed as too hard. Instinct’s team composition, with three cofounders spanning propulsion, avionics, and mission design, suggests they have done the math on what a small lander actually requires.