Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is seeking as much as $150 million in new investment as it gets ready for a key rocket launch and a dramatic expansion of its satellite presence.
The outlines of the offering are described in documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing reports that $40,656,523 worth of securities have been sold, with $110 mlllion remaining to sell. The first sale was recorded on Oct. 19, according to the filing.
This offering isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill funding round. The filing says the total amount includes a $60 million convertible debt facility and $50 million in capital stock, the sale of which is subject to regulatory approval.
The $40 million sold so far includes more than $15 million in capital stock issued pursuant to the conversion of convertible notes, according to the Form D documents.
Spaceflight Industries told GeekWire that it couldn’t disclose any additional information at this time, “due to the nature of the deal and the parties involved.”
The company’s backers include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management, RRE Venture Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures. Last year, Spaceflight Industries conducted a $25 million Series B financing round.
This September, it struck up a partnership with the Space Alliance, a venture involving Europe’s Thales Alenia Space and Telespazio. As part of the deal, Thales Alenia and Telespazio pledged to make a minority investment in Spaceflight Industries, and it’s likely that the offering reported today pertains at least in part to that pledge.
Spaceflight Industries has two main lines of business. One division, Spaceflight, focuses on launch services and mission management for rideshare payloads. The payloads go up on other companies’ rockets, including SpaceX’s Falcon 9, India’s PSLV and Orbital ATK’s Antares.
The other division, Black Sky, is building a constellation of Earth-observing satellites and a software platform that would let customers acquire low-cost imagery from orbit in as little as 90 minutes. The first prototype Black Sky satellite was launched a year ago, and 60 satellites are due to go into orbit by 2020.
Both lines of business are going strong: Last month, Spaceflight won a $5.5 million NASA contract for nanosatellite launches over the next three years. In August, Black Sky made a $16.4 million deal with the Air Force for the development of a customized, cloud-based geospatial intelligence platform.
Spaceflight Industries also has had to deal with delays: Spaceflight’s dedicated SSO-A rideshare mission on a Falcon 9, which is designed to deploy scores of satellites into orbit, has been pushed off until next year, largely due to a schedule slips on SpaceX’s part. Meanwhile, a PSLV launch mishap in August put a crimp in the launch schedules for Spaceflight as well as Black Sky.
