SpaceX’s new $850 million raise confirmed in SEC filing

SpaceX hasn’t issued any public statement about the $850 million in fresh funding CNBC reported it raised last week, but a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published today confirms the round. SpaceX’s funding was said to value the company at around $74 billion, with a per-share value set at just under $420.

Investment firm Sequoia led the considerable raise and has now put over $600 million into the Elon Musk-led space company overall between this and a round it participated in in 2020, according to Bloomberg. CNBC’s report also said that a secondary sale of existing shares generated an additional $750 million in capital for the company, putting the total new money available for SpaceX’s use at $1.6 billion — not too far shy of the $2 billion it raised at a valuation of $46 billion last August.

That probably seems like a lot of money to raise in less than a year. But few companies — private or otherwise — have the kind of capital needs of SpaceX. While it’s been able to build a thriving launch business on the money raised during the first part of its now nearly two-decade existence, that hasn’t slowed the rate at which it’s been undertaking big new projects with tremendous upfront costs.

Currently, SpaceX is rapidly building new prototypes of its Starship, a next-generation reusable rocket with multiple times the cargo capacity of its current Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 cargo nosecone. It has flown a number of prototypes — and lost two in the process due to missed landings. The company typically has at least two new prototypes under construction simultaneously and had been operating at that pace for many months now, with a highly manual production process for both the rockets and the new engines that power them.

SpaceX launches 60 more satellites for its Starlink service on the heels of opening up access

Meanwhile, it’s also building out Starlink — the global broadband internet satellite constellation that it wants to scale from its current 1,000+ size to more than 12,000 for final, world-spanning coverage reach. To scale it quickly and get its service operational (which it now is, to select areas in North America), SpaceX has been launching its own dedicated Falcon 9 rockets with 60 Starlink satellites on each. Since the company is its own customer for the majority of those missions, they’re entirely operating expenditures. Musk has estimated that fully deploying Starlink will take around $10 billion.

Both of these projects — Starship and Starlink — carry massive upfront costs, but they also have a lot of potential long-term upside; hence the skyrocketing valuation as both efforts begin to produce positive results, between Starship’s high-altitude tests and Starlink’s initial service availability.