SpaceX Veteran Raises $65 Million to Modernize Aerospace Wire Harnesses

Senra, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineer Jordan Black, has raised a $65 million Series B round to modernize the manufacturing of wire harnesses, the internal electrical cabling that runs through rockets, satellites, and defense vehicles. The company argues that wire harness production has barely changed since the Cold War, relying on manual processes that have not kept pace with modern aerospace manufacturing.

Black started Senra in 2023 with co-founder Benjamin Shanahan after his time at SpaceX, where he took on scaling up wire harnesses to support production of Starship. Traveling to visit wire harness companies around the world, he found the work still done on wooden tables using manual methods. Wire harnesses are bespoke assemblies put together by technicians who function as experienced craftspeople, and they grow more important as vehicles get smarter.

The Series B was co-led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos, with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, among others. Black could not disclose customers but said they include builders of submarines and maritime vehicles, land-based defense vehicle systems, launch vehicles, and satellites. The company is benefiting from the surge of money into U.S. manufacturing, particularly the defense industrial base.

Senra does not aim to remove humans from the handmaking process, at least while robots still struggle to manipulate wires and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead it uses software and automation to modernize the traditional manual work. Its proprietary platform, Amp, standardizes inputs throughout the wiring process and produces a digital twin to guide technicians, who are trained through what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. "Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it's all the little inputs that happen that can make a catastrophic change down the road," Black said.

Black points to a 2023 incident in which Boeing discovered its Starliner spacecraft's wiring was held together with flammable tape, forcing an expensive delay while the entire wiring system was redone. He cites that experience as a reason to raise standards, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. On automation, he invoked what he called the Elon principle that "automation is last," noting that standardization and foundation building allowed SpaceX to scale rocket production from perhaps one a year to hundreds a year.

The name Senra is "harness" spelled backwards, minus the "h" and "s," a reference Black says to taking the nonsense out of harnesses. The company currently produces 1,000 wire harnesses each month across two factories.

For the aerospace and defense industry, wire harnesses remain one of the most labor-intensive and least automated parts of manufacturing, and a known bottleneck in production ramp-ups. Black's argument, backed by his experience scaling harness production at SpaceX, is that modernizing this work through software and standardization can lift the standards and the pace of how fast these vehicles get built.

Senra plans to increase production to 10,000 wire harnesses a month in 2027, and Black says the company is working now on automating more of the process as it scales.