Lucas Maddox is Co-Founder at Kyten Technologies, a Y Combinator W26 company building a factory to manufacture custom aerospace-grade battery packs for drones, submarines, and satellites. Kyten delivers high-volume production in weeks rather than the 12+ months typical of legacy aerospace suppliers.

Lucas spent nearly three years at Starlink where he owned some of the program's most difficult and urgent test and manufacturing challenges, helping deploy over 5,000 battery packs to space. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a focus on Power Systems from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he cofounded the university's solar car team and built its electrical system from scratch.

Lucas and his co-founder Cooper McBride have a combined eight years of experience at Starlink and Shield AI scaling aerospace electrical systems that power over half the satellites in orbit and thousands of battlefield drones. The founders previously worked together at SpaceX four years ago, where they helped produce and deploy more than 6,000 battery packs to low earth orbit.

Kyten Technologies is based in Seattle, WA and is part of the Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch. The company addresses the critical supply chain bottleneck affecting over 100,000 drones, submarines, and satellites being built in the US.

Kyten brings rapid development and volume production capabilities to an industry where legacy suppliers force manufacturers into costly vertical integration. The company leverages experience from America's most successful high-rate aerospace programs at SpaceX, Shield AI, and Tesla to modernize aerospace battery manufacturing.