ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Josh Giegel has spent his career on what he calls “the wrong side” of the software-hardware divide. He built rocket engines at SpaceX. He built supercritical CO2 power cycles in Ohio. He built a hyperloop and then climbed inside it.
So when he tells you not to build hardware, it should mean something.
Josh started Gambit in 2023, in the middle of the drone gold rush, and deliberately did not build a drone. Set against the backdrop of the drone “gold rush,” that fundamental decision has shaped the company he’s built, and the impact they’re having just a few years into the journey.
About Josh
Josh grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a nuclear reactor engineer and an electrical engineer. His sister is an engineer. His wife is an engineer. His brother-in-law is an engineer. Suffice to say, the dude has forever been surrounded by tech nerds.
His formative moment came at twelve, in the garage, watching his dad fix the car. Josh assumed his father was the smartest man alive who knew everything. But his dad corrected him that day: he actually did not know how to fix the car. But he knew how to solve the problem.
Josh went to Penn State, then Stanford for grad school, and interned at NASA Glenn at 21, which he describes as “underwhelming compared to the movies.” A colleague pointed him toward a small space company in Los Angeles, so he found himself interviewing with an up-and-coming entrepreneur named Elon Musk in the window between Falcon 1’s third and fourth flights, before SpaceX had ever reached orbit. Musk described building a reusable rocket engine rated for a hundred flights. Josh asked why anyone would want that. The answer was that they were going to land the rocket.
Josh went on to become one of about five engineers who built the Merlin 1D. It sits in the Smithsonian now. He left when SpaceX had grown from 400 people to 2,500 (still the largest company he ever worked for), because he could tell the founding-level experience was no longer available there.
Then came Virgin Hyperloop, where he served as CTO and later CEO across roughly seven years. Six years after starting, he sat inside the vehicle his team had built and put his own life on the line.
About Gambit
Gambit builds a platform-agnostic software layer that lets one operator orchestrate many autonomous systems across air, ground, and sea. The thesis is that robots are commoditizing, platforms are proliferating, and no single manufacturer is going to rule them all. The constraint becomes less about machine availability and more about the people to run them.
Gambit thinks about their product as an entire robot workforce rather than a “better robot.” Each entity is a specialist that works together toward a cohesive whole, much the same way a soccer team has forwards and a goalie, or a band has a guitarist and a lead singer.
The product architecture reflects the thesis: roughly ten software containers, from behavior building to composition to runtime interfaces, that can be split apart and sold in pieces. Behaviors are solved by platform class rather than by manufacturer, so a quadcopter class or a fixed wing class covers many vendors with a parameter file rather than a bespoke integration.
The company exited stealth in January 2026 with partnerships including AWS, L3Harris, RTX, and Sierra Nevada. Since then it has announced two multi-million dollar Air Force contracts, an Army GVSC OTA for counter-UAS simulation, a red force as a service partnership with the Pendleton UAS Range, and integrations with ModalAI and Psionic.
For more on Gambit: https://www.gambit.us
For more Crossing the Valley: https://www.youtube.com/@crossingthevalley
Follow Josh Giegel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-giegel/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com
