The business has raised $200 million in equity and debt as it plans its first-ever launch for Saturday.
(Bloomberg) — Astranis Space Technologies Corp. has raised $200 million to build more satellites, according to a person familiar with the matter. At the same time, the company is preparing for its first-ever launch next week — the culmination of years of research and manufacturing.Â
The financing deal was led by the growth fund of Andreessen Horowitz, and included a combination of equity and debt. The person declined to say how much of the transaction was debt. The funding valued the company at $1.6 billion, the person said. Astranis declined to comment for this story.
Astranis builds geostationary satellites, which operate at more than 22,000 miles above Earth and appear as permanent fixtures in the sky. That’s a different technology than that of companies like Starlink, a unit of Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which makes near-Earth satellites that orbit the globe.Â
Astranis’s new valuation is not far off from its previous $1.4 billion price tag from two years ago, when it raised money from funds managed by BlackRock Inc. and other investors. The relatively flat number stands in contrast to the cratering values of other tech companies, both public and private, which have been hit hard this year by rising interest rates and, more recently, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Venture capital funding to startups sank by more than half during the first quarter of 2023 from the year before, according to PitchBook.
Investors haven’t lost interest in every industry, though. Artificial intelligence and national defense technology startups, including space-related businesses like Astranis, haven’t seen the same headwinds as the rest of tech. Venture investors spent more than $6 billion on space-related technology last year, up from less than $2 billion five years ago.
San Francisco-based Astranis has spent the past four years building its first machine, which is expected to launch April 18 on a SpaceX rocket. Astranis’s satellite is roughly the size of an industrial washing machine, and features software that allows ground crews to change the frequencies remotely. The company expects to launch another four satellites this summer and counts the US Defense Department and telecommunication providers in far-flung areas like Alaska and Peru among its customers.Â
(Company corrects date of launch in the first and last paragraphs.)
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