TAMPA, Fla. — Loft Orbital has raised $170 million to expand manufacturing facilities and streamline operations with more artificial intelligence, the San Francisco-based satellite operator announced Jan. 14.
Tikehau Capital and Axial Partners co-led the eight-year-old venture’s Series C funding round, bringing total capital raised to around $325 million for a business aiming to simplify access to space by enabling customers to share spacecraft.
Loft Orbital sources satellite buses from multiple vendors, integrating them with payloads flown on behalf of customers seeking to avoid the costs and complexity of owning and operating their own infrastructure.
Competitors in an increasingly crowded space-as-a-service market include Spire Global, which develops buses for smaller satellites in-house.
The total mass of a default Loft Orbital satellite starts around 200 kilograms, co-founder and chief operating officer Alex Greenberg told SpaceNews in an interview, and has near-term plans to offer more powerful spacecraft bigger than 500kg.
Standardizing space
Loft Orbital’s business is centered around a modular payload adapter that standardizes how payloads connect to satellite buses from vendors such as Airbus and BlackSky, as well as mission operations software designed to manage hybrid fleets and constellations at scale.
“We actually have satellites on a shelf,” Greenberg said, which are “all basically identical from a hardware perspective, and we just configure those satellites to apply a customer payload.
“We’re not building or designing a satellite uniquely for a customer. We’re using what we have in inventory … and I think that is indicative of the turnkey nature of our offering, which is very different than what a lot of other companies are doing that say they do space-as-a-service, but are still fundamentally designing a bespoke solution for a customer.”
Loft Orbital has deployed five satellites to date but has around 30 in backlog, most slated to launch in 2025-2026. The company says this represents around $500 million in aggregate contract value since its inception, with customers ranging from NASA to French fleet operator Eutelsat.
According to Loft Orbital, demand for its condosat services is mainly coming from applications in climate change monitoring, growing national security and sovereignty requirements, and an increasing appetite for connectivity and data-driven insights.
Proceeds from the Series C round will support the ramp-up of manufacturing and integration facilities, including a 4,600-square-meter factory being developed in the United Arab Emirates under a joint venture.
Future intelligence
The company’s future plans include integrating artificial intelligence to automate satellite operations and optimize data processing to further improve efficiency.
YAM-6, launched last year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, is Loft Orbital’s first satellite dedicated to running AI in space, enabling customers to customize the use of the satellite for various imaging applications.
Improving the ability for customers to seamlessly deploy software applications to a satellite is currently the biggest limitation with using AI in space, Greenberg said.
“You usually build your satellite for yourself, or for a specific customer, and you’re not uploading software on it — except for your own software updates, and you’re not even doing that very often,” he said.
“Loft has this almost transformative paradigm where we’re not thinking of the satellite as a walled garden, we’re thinking of it as a data center that anybody can use.”
Ultimately, Loft envisions a customer could log onto its website, pick satellites or sensors they want to use for a virtual mission, upload their application, and then pay for the service without interacting with an employee.
“We’re not there yet, and maybe we’ll never get there, but that’s the guiding vision of this whole virtual mission offering,” he added.
Bpifrance, Foundation Capital, Temasek, and Uncork Capital also participated in the Series C round.