By
Bena Ilyas
April 23rd, 2024
SpaceX has completed another successful funding round which boosted its valuation.
SpaceX, an Elon Musk’s company focused on space exploration and transportation, has just completed enormous funding of $850 million. This was made known by a report of CNBC that says the SpaceX valuation has now risen to as high as $74 billion.
According to the report, the company was able to raise this level of funding by selling its shares for $419.99. This is just a cent less than when the founder declared that he had secured funding to take his other company, leading electric car maker, Tesla, private in 2018.
In August 2020, when a similar funding round was done, the company was able to raise only $2 million and its valuation then stood at just $46 billion. This current leap represents a growth of around 60% for the space exploration company.
Not only that, the report also went on to state that the firm’s investors were able to “sell $750 million in a secondary transaction.” An insider in the deal also added that “the company received “insane demand” of about $6 billion in offers over the course of just three days.”
SpaceX fundraising talks were held majorly in private because the firm is not a publicly-traded company.
Starlink and Starship Projects Help SpaceX Valuation to Grow
SpaceX is currently working on two ambitious projects that are capital-intensive. They are: Starlink and Starship
Starlink is a project that seeks to build an “interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites,” and commonly referred to as a constellation. It is a project being geared towards providing fast internet services to customers around the world. Leaders of the project had estimated that the project would cost at least $10 billion but it would be able to generate a return that is as high as 10 times revenue of the company’s existing space exploration business.
The company has made considerable success with this project as it has already rolled out a beta version to its customers in the U.K., Canada and the United States. And according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, the project already has over 10,000 users both in America and abroad.
On the other hand is its Starship project which is a reusable orbital vehicle that would eventually replace the existing Falcon 9 and SpaceX Dragon 2. The Starship rocket has been under work in Boca Chica, Texas where the company has been testing and launching multiple prototypes.
While the project has been able to successfully launch and land some of these prototypes after flights to about 500 feet altitude, recent attempts to fly at a higher-altitude have resulted in failure as they had always exploded on impacts during their attempts to land.
However, despite these explosions, SpaceX has said the firm is making progress in its development of the rockets that could take “cargo and as many as 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and Mars.”