Company
Two people, three years, and a problem worth ten more.
Pyxaris is based in Toronto. We have been working on this for three years, most of it on the physics and the regulatory path rather than on code, because in this business those two things determine whether anything else is possible.
Settled so far: the link architecture and spectrum strategy, the device concept and its power budget, the constellation geometry, the distribution model, and the adversarial threat model. A patent filing is in progress. The near-term milestone is a bench demonstration of the device-to-receiver link.
Founders
Murat Beshtoev
Chief Executive · Chief Technology
Murat began as an electronics engineer at the Baksan Neutrino Observatory, building detection instrumentation in a deep underground low-background laboratory inside a mountain in the Caucasus. Roughly 4,700 metres water equivalent of rock overhead suppresses the cosmic-ray muon flux by a factor of ten million. Instruments there have to hold accuracy at very low signal levels while running continuously and unattended, with no realistic chance of going to fix them.
Recovering a very small signal from noise, on hardware nobody can reach, is the problem he worked on then and it is the problem he is working on now.
Since then he has built and run production systems at scale. At Dye & Durham he is the de facto chief data officer, having designed and built the company's first governed data platform on Databricks and AWS, now ingesting around ninety production sources daily at full reliability, on automated infrastructure with no standing human access to production, with a team of twenty-five across five countries. At Bayer Canada he ran analytics and innovation and delivered fifty million dollars in recurring savings. At Constellation Software he evaluated and executed nine acquisitions.
He holds an M.Sc. in theoretical physics and mathematics from MEPhI, and is also a CPA, which is unusual for a physicist and means he can design the system and defend its unit economics in the same meeting.
Elena Shchetinina
Chief Product · Chief Operating
Elena has shipped software products end to end as a product manager, working across a range of languages, stacks and architectures. At Pyxaris she owns product and the entire ground-side experience: what happens to an activation once it reaches us, who sees it, and what they are able to do about it.
That side of the company is where the hardest non-physics problems live, and it is the part that determines whether any of the engineering matters.
What we already know is hard
The list we keep.
We would rather state these plainly than be asked about them. None of them is a reason not to build the company, and all of them shape what we build.
The cost floor is a target, not a fact
A radio, an antenna, a controller and a power source with multi-year shelf life have a real floor, and the cell alone is a meaningful part of it. We are designing to a target on the order of a dollar at volume, and we are deliberate about the difference between manufacturing something cheaply and subsidising it to nothing at the point of use. The second is a more defensible model and the one that funders of this kind of work recognise.
The environments that matter most are the worst for radio
The places where someone is most likely to need this are rarely open sky. Designing for the favourable case and hoping is not a plan, and the answer shapes the device rather than being bolted onto it afterwards.
Accidental activation may dwarf deliberate abuse
At near-zero cost and wide availability, curiosity, children and discarded units will almost certainly generate more traffic than any adversary. This shapes how activations are ranked and triaged more than the deliberate attack does, and it is the likelier source of noise by a wide margin.
A beacon that reaches nobody is not a product
The response chain is jurisdictional, institutional and slow to build, and it is not something engineering can route around. We treat it as a central part of the company rather than an integration to be arranged later.
Why us
The instinct behind this company is not that satellites are interesting. It is that every existing option assumes a customer who bought a device in advance, in anticipation of danger, and that assumption quietly excludes almost everyone in genuine distress. Search and rescue agencies, humanitarian organisations and emergency services face the same gap from the other side: no signal to search on.
Closing that gap is a hardware cost problem, a radio problem, a regulatory problem and an institutional problem at the same time. We are looking for a third founder to own the link budget and the space segment.