Taliesin Space Monthly Funding Recap
April 2019
With just under $92M invested in 6 startups, April continued a great year for space investment, bringing the YTD total to more than $1.6B (disclosed rounds).
For the full list of April’s space investments — and some background on them, scroll down!
To find more information on the companies below, and keep up with announcements, milestones, and product releases in space startup land, and join in the conversation, sign up for the Taliesin beta! 🚀
Highlights
Funding Trends
Funding in April totaled $92M, which for the most part went into the two trending company segments that investors have been focusing on recently.
What We’re Thinking About — How do you engineer an industry?
This month we’ve been reflecting on how far commercial spaceflight has come in recent history, and where it could go in the future.
The main topic of debate has been how (or if) we might be able to optimize growth to more efficiently create the SciFi future we all dream about — millions of people living & working in space, humanity as an interplanetary species, setting out across the void to discover new worlds and settle the galaxy, etc.
Most of us agree that this would be likely impossible to do on funding from governments alone, and that there are a lot of legitimate risks in the commercial spaceflight — so how do we ensure continued and sustainable progress going forward?
Below are some of the related concepts we’ve discussed…
Business Models (and Metrics) over Grand Visions
- While revolutionary ideas can sound crazy or implausible at first, and many don’t become profitable for quite some time, the ones that do well all have one thing in common — constant, measurable Growth. If not revenue, or profit, they provide concrete revenue precursors or substitutes that indicate their potential as a profitable enterprise at scale.
- As investment in the space ecosystem goes mainstream we think that later stage investors will be less likely to blindly fund deep tech/moonshots without a reasonable expectation of value generation within an acceptable timeframe, especially when there are so many viable, albeit less interesting, companies looking for investment in other industries.
Platforms or Monoliths?
This is one of our most hotly debated concepts — we agree that there’s a clear bias towards vertical integration in some parts of the ecosystem however…
- Some of us think that non-software-related sectors within the space ecosystem have a hard time finding ideas that are small enough to solve in a reasonable timeframe, but big enough to be an attractive business.
- To fix this, some of us believe newer players are embracing a change in culture to emulate the sort of opportunistic agility that software startups practice — many successful platforms within the software industry started out solving a bigger, vertically integrated problem, but pivoted to offer a piece of their stack as a 3rd party solution when they realized lots of other founders were struggling with the same problem.
- If/when this becomes the norm in the Space ecosystem, we’d expect to see a significant increase in the volume and diversity of new use cases and opportunities.
on the other hand…
- Some of us think that the ability to vertically integrate is a key driver behind the growth of new entrants winning in the industry — enabled by software and new methods of organization/management, new players are able to better manage a vertically integrated supply chain, achieve significant efficiencies or advantages over their incumbent competitors.
In all likelihood, they each could be right depending on the company, so we’re sure this will be a recurring topic of discussion as time goes on.
Keeping an Open Mind
- Following on the idea of building more platforms rather than vertically integrated monoliths we spent quite some time discussing how people may decide to build weird or implausible things on these platforms that may not make sense at first, but may end up being successful in the end.
- In the case of the software industry, there is a lot which would not have been possible (or would never have been funded even if they were viable) without the industry’s tendency to create platforms — imagine the staggering difference in cost to build PokemonGo in 2000 vs 2012 when it was built) — some of us think there’s likely a lot of this sort of thing in spaceflight as well, so, assuming the trend towards platforms continues, it will be interesting to see what gets built on top of them.
Playing Nice or Picking Sides?
This discussion centered around the uptick in geopolitical tension over the past few years, centering around global trade, communications networks, and competition over the development of impactful technology like AI.
- We disagree on how the global community of space ecosystem companies (which have significant exposure to geopolitical risk) should react to this changing environment.
- We’re split pretty evenly among a few opinions (embrace geopolitical interests, ignore them, or resist them), but we agreed that each could be a successful strategy, depending on the company.
- A key area we’ll be watching for this to play out in is one of the biggest private initiatives in commercial space flight — the buildout of LEO broadband constellations — is particularly exposed to geopolitical risk
February Funding Rounds
Nautilus Labs
Nautilus is building artificial intelligence to advance the efficiency of ocean commerce.
Astroscale
Astroscale is an satellite de-orbit and orbital debris removal company.
SpaceX
SpaceX is an aviation and aerospace company that designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. They ended up raising $44M, according to public records.
Slingshot Aero
Slingshot is builds a next generation of satellite, aerial, and drone signal processing AI and analytics capabilities.
Bluefield Technologies
Precise, always-on methane leak detection via microsatellites.
SpeQtral
SpeSpeQtral is developing space-based, quantum communication built on technologies developed at the Centre for Quantum Technologies.
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