Erik Palitsch

Co-Founder & CEO
Freeform

Securing a $10-million NVentures investment and validation in the NVIDIA Inception program, Erik Palitsch is the co-founder and CEO at Freeform. He directs the New Industrialization manufacturing platform by deploying Physical AI to automate large-scale autonomous vehicle and defense system production. This expertise extends to heavy liquid rocket propulsion development following his more than a decade tenure at SpaceX where he managed the Merlin Vacuum engine programs powering the Falcon 9 second stage. Leveraging this record of success, Palitsch engineered GoldenEye, a proprietary factory-as-a-service asset integrating 18 high-power one-kilowatt lasers running continuously to process thousands of components. He sustains this momentum by driving local industrial competitiveness panels and mentoring early-stage hardware founders across the Southern California aerospace ecosystem. This leadership trajectory supports high-throughput microsecond telemetry tracking to adjust complex metal printing physics.