Loft Orbital lands a new $170M after recording more than $500M in bookings

Space infrastructure company Loft Orbital has raised $170 million in Series C funding co-led by Tikehau Capital and Axial Partners. In particular, the amount of Series C funding That’s more than the combined $160 million the company has raised since its 2017 start.

Orbital Loft he declined to reveal his rating. 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, bringing the company’s lifetime total 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 have achieved more than $500 million in bookings on only $160 million of capital raised before 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 making the business sustainable.“

The company has sold more than 30 satellites and its customers include NASA, Microsoft, Anduril and BAE Systems, among others. In total, it says it has deployed more than 25 customer missions on its five satellites launched to date.

When it started in January 2017, the company’s self-described mission was to “make it easy for organizations to deploy and operate missions in space.” In a few words, Loft aims to manage the process of implementing and operating customer missions as a service.

It buys standard satellites from vendors such as Airbus and LeoStella and places 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 on a Loft satellite to leverage on-board sensors and compute nodes, analyze data as it’s collected, and run a wide range of cases of use

Loft has been occupied since late. The startup last August announced a joint venture with Abu Dhabi-based Marlan Space raised more than $100 million by a holding company affiliated with an Emirati royal family to grow the region’s domestic satellite manufacturing capabilities.

It also says that it launched YAM-6, a satellite dedicated to execution of AI in space.

Greenberg said Loft will use its new capital in two ways. It is expected to scale from the launch of a handful of satellites per year to ten more per year. They also want to expand their virtual missions, expand their AI business where customers can create an AI system in their own cloud (wildfire detection for example), and deploy it in a Loft satellite. And it hopes to cultivate an ecosystem of AI application partners.