(Jan 14): Loft Orbital raised US$170 million (RM765.89 million) in a funding round that will help the space infrastructure startup increase launch frequency and compete for contracts against aerospace juggernauts like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin Corp.

The San Francisco-based company builds standardised satellites to which paying customers can attach components like sensors, cameras or telescopes. Then, Loft arranges for the spacecraft to be launched into space, allowing third parties a way to collect data and deploy missions to orbit without building their own vehicles. The company, which was founded in 2017, has so far flown five satellites. 

“We’re going from a cadence of maybe one to two satellite launches a year to 10 plus,” Alex Greenberg, chief operating officer and co-founder of the company, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Investors in the funding round announced on Tuesday include French asset management firm Tikehau Capital, Singapore’s state-owned investor Temasek Holdings (Private) Ltd and Tribeca Venture Partners, according to Loft. 

Loft Orbital previously raised US$130 million in 2021 in a funding round led by BlackRock. Since then, the startup has signed US$500 million in contracts for customers like Nasa, Microsoft Corp, the European Space Agency and the US Space Force, with a backlog of some 30 satellites awaiting launch.

The market for flying satellites to space comes in somewhere between US$30 to US$40 billion, according to Greenberg. But Loft Orbital has a hefty amount of competitors to face for that market share — including any firm that is developing satellites for customers, whether that’s large-scale aerospace giants or medium commercial developers.

Loft Orbital will also announce plans on Tuesday to include and grow customer-provided artificial intelligence capabilities on board. That means their satellites can monitor events, like natural disasters or war developments, and send data to Earth in real time, the company said. 

In June 2024, the company launched YAM-6, its first AI-enabled satellite, by configuring an AI software application onto its satellite platform, what the company calls a “virtual mission”.

“We’re building not the apps themselves; we’re building the infrastructure that allows this space app economy to begin to flourish,” Greenberg said. “It’s very nascent now. It doesn’t even fully exist yet.”

Since its last funding round, the company has expanded operations in San Francisco, as well as in its other locations in Colorado, France and, recently, Abu Dhabi.

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