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Space infrastructure company Loft Orbital has raised $170 million in Series C funding co-led by Tikehau Capital and Axial Partners. Note that the amount Series C financing more than the $160 million the company has raised since 2017.
Loft Orbital refused to disclose the price. At the time of its latest raise in 2021, its post-money valuation — a $130 million Series B round — was $550 million, according to PitchBook.
Bpifrance, Foundation Capital, Temasek and Uncork Capital also participated, bringing the company’s lifetime total to $330 million.
Loft also declined to release hard revenue numbers, but co-founder and COO Alex Greenberg told TechCrunch that the company has grown its revenue by 100% for two years in a row.
“We have secured over $500 million in orders with only $160 million in capital raised prior to this Series C. In an industry known for being capital intensive, we pride ourselves on capital efficiency,” he said. “Right now we’re really focused on profitability and business continuity.“
The company has sold more than 30 satellites and its customers include NASA, Microsoft, Anduril and BAE Systems. In total, it said it has deployed more than 25 customer missions on five satellites launched to date.
When it launched in January 2017, the company’s self-described mission was to “make it easier for organizations to deploy and manage missions in space.” In short, Loft aims to manage the process of deploying and managing customer missions as a service.
It buys standard satellites from suppliers such as Airbus and LeoStella and equips them with customers’ payloads, saving them the hassle of buying, operating and managing their own hardware and ground segment networks.
“Unlike others in the industry, we don’t design satellites for specific missions—we configure existing components of our satellite platform,” Greenberg said. “Think of it like Lego building blocks.”
It also offers “virtual missions,” which allow its customers to host software applications on the Loft satellite to use onboard sensors and computing nodes, analyze data as it is collected, and manage all use cases.
The Loft has been busy lately. Last August, the startup announced a joint venture with Abu Dhabi-based Marlan Space It has collected more than 100 million dollars from a holding company linked to the Emirati royal family to boost the region’s local satellite manufacturing capabilities.
It also reports that it launched the YAM-6 satellite into orbit runs AI in space.
The Loft will use its new capital in two ways, Greenberg said. It plans to go from launching a handful of satellites a year to more than a dozen each year. It also wants to expand its virtual missions, AI business, where customers can build an artificial intelligence system (such as forest fire detection) in their cloud and deploy it to the Loft satellite. And it hopes to develop an ecosystem of AI application partners.
