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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. Notably, the amount of the Series C financing is greater than the combined $160 million the company has raised since its 2017 inception.
Loft Orbital declined to reveal its valuation. According to PitchBook, its post-money valuation at the time of its last raise in 2021 – a $130 million Series B round – was $550 million.
Bpifrance, Foundation Capital, Temasek, and Uncork Capital also participated, which brings the company’s total raised over its lifetime to $330 million.
Loft also declined to reveal hard revenue figures but co-founder and COO Alex Greenberg told TechCrunch that the company has grown revenue by 100% two years in a row.
“We’ve achieved over $500 million of bookings on only $160 million of capital raised prior to this Series C. In an industry known for its capital intensity, we are proud of our capital efficiency,” he added. “Right now we’re really focused on profitability and getting the business to sustainability.”
The company has sold over 30 satellites and its customers include NASA, Microsoft, Anduril and BAE Systems, among others. In total, it says it has deployed over 25 customer missions across its five satellites launched to date.
When it started in January 2017, the company’s self-described mission was to “make it simple for organizations to deploy and operate missions in space.” In a nutshell, Loft aims to handle the process of deploying and operating customer missions as a service.
It buys standard satellites from vendors like Airbus and LeoStella and outfits them with payloads from customers, saving them the hassle of purchasing, operating and managing their own hardware and ground segment network.
“Unlike others in the industry, we’re not designing satellites for specific missions- we’re configuring existing components of our satellite platform,” Greenberg said. “Think of it like Lego building blocks.”
It also offers “virtual missions,” allowing its customers to deploy their software apps onto a Loft satellite to leverage on-board sensors and compute nodes, analyze data as it is being collected and run a whole range of use cases.
Loft has been busy as of late. The startup last August announced a joint venture with Abu Dhabi-based Marlan Space that raised over $100 million from a holding company affiliated with an Emirati royal family to grow the region’s domestic satellite manufacturing capabilities.
It also says it has launched YAM-6, a satellite dedicated to running AI in space.
Greenberg said Loft will use its new capital in two ways. It plans to scale from launching a handful of satellites per year to ten-plus annually. It also wants to expand its virtual missions, expand its AI business where customers can create an AI system in their own cloud (wildfire detection for instance) and deploy it onto a Loft satellite. And he hopes to grow an ecosystem of AI application partners.
Mary Ann Azevedo has more than 20 years of business reporting and editing experience for publications such as FinLedger, Crunchbase News, Crain, Forbes and Silicon Valley Business Journal. Prior to joining TechCrunch in 2021, she earned numerous awards including the New York Times Chairman’s Award and others for breaking news coverage. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas in Austin, where she currently lives.
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