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Rocket Lab raises $75 million

The competition heats up: Rocket Lab announced today that it has raised an additional $75 million in investment capital.

The new funding round is led by venture capital firm Data Collective, with contributions from another VC firm, Promus Ventures, and an undisclosed investor. Several prior investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and K1W1, also participated in the round.

Rocket Lab said the Series D round brings the total raised by the company to $148 million, and values the company at more than $1 billion. Rocket Lab announced a Series B round of unspecified size in 2015, and Peter Beck, the company’s chief executive, said the company did an unannounced Series C round in the interim involving only existing investors.

In an interview, Beck said the money will go towards increasing the production capacity for its Electron rocket, set to make its debut later this year. “This is really all about scaling,” he said. “The funding is all about producing the vehicle in much more significant numbers.”

They say they will make their first launch in the coming months, but remain vague about specific dates.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • LocalFluff

    $75M is enough to launch no less than two Electron on a Falcon 9. Budget, mass, size (if Electron’s two stages are separated) all fit inside its fairing. Including their 150 kg payloads.

    I wish them all luck, and they obviously has some. We’ll see if sat miniaturization will help this dedicated smallsat launch business. I’m afraid that, when the huge reusable launchers get online next decade, it will see a market as large as that for intercontinental flights in a Cessna.

  • Dick Eagleson

    The big launchers will get the job of gang deployments for new smallsat constellations. The small onesy-twosy launchers will find plenty of work in replacing infant mortality and longer-term in-service losses within these constellations.

  • Edward

    LocalFluff,
    I wouldn’t worry about the “Cessna” market. Even Cessna is doing well.

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