With over $6b in funding to space-tech companies worldwide, 2024 is officially in the books. Wrapping up a healthy year for space-tech investment, December saw 21 companies raise a total of $697m in funding.
A surprise last-minute surge by Australian startups highlighted the month, with Fleet Space raising $150m for their satellite-based mineral exploration, and Myriota raising $50m for direct-to-orbit connectivity. Until December, only three Australian startups had raised a combined total of $48m (Conflux, Metakosmos, and Gilmour).
In the “what else is news” category, China once again saw several large investments, with three companies raising large rounds – including a satellite manufacturer (Genesat) and liquid rocket manufacturer (Landspace) which raised over $122m each.
I’d like to thank those of you who read this year’s column. It’s been a labour of love putting it together each month, and I hope it helped to identify some interesting companies at the forefront of the spacetech industry.
Onwards to 2025!
All deals in December 2024, by $ (descending)
- Fleet Space (Australia) – satellite-based mineral exploration – raised $150m.
- Shanghai Gesi Aerospace (Genesat) (China) – satellite manufacturing – raised CNY1b.
- Landspace Technology (China) – liquid rockets – raised CNY900m.
- ICEYE (Finland) – synthetic aperture radar satellite ops for EO – raised $65m.
- Myriota (Australia) – direct-to-orbit connectivity provider – raised $50m.
- TMYTEK (Taiwan) – millimetre-wave (mmWave) solutions – raised $40m.
- Shifang Starlink (Suzhou) (China) – MEO relay system – raised CNY200m.
- Pixxel (India) – hyperspectral EO via smallsats – raised $24m.
- FibreCoat (Germany) – coating technologies – raised €20m.
- ION-X (France) – space propulsion – raised €13m.
- SpinLaunch (USA) – satellite launches via high speed spin launches – raised $11.5m.
- Lumen Orbit (USA) – in-orbit data centres – raised $11m.
- Hemav (Spain) – agricultural imagery and predictive software – raised €8m.
- Solarcore (USA) – thermal insulation – raised $8m.
- Orbite (USA) – training for astsronauts – raised $4m.
- Star Test Future (China) – on-orbit intelligent service capabilities – raised CNY20m.
- Fluid Wire Robotics (Italy) – advanced robotic arms – raised €1.2m.
- TETMET (France) – adaptive spatial lattice manufacturing – raised €1.2m.
Raised an undisclosed amount
- Suzhou Wuvue Aviation (China) – aviation parts production
- Multiverse Computing (Spain) – accelerating computing through quantum
- Turion Space (United States) – droid micro-satellites
Estimating the size of the Spacetech industry
SpaceWatch.Global estimates that in 2024, 263 companies have raised $6.1b of venture equity funding.
- January: 27 deals, $533m
- February: 35 deals, $1.79b
- March: 12 deals, $94m
- April: 26 deals, $472m
- May: 22 deals, $270m
- June: 25 deals, $738m
- July: 31 deals, $535m
- Aug: 19 deals, $170m
- Sept: 21 deals, $334m
- Oct: 27 deals, $1.33b
- Nov: 21 deals, $447m
- Dec: 21 deals, $697m
Benchmarking our estimate
The Dealroom/ESA Space Tech Dashboard is a great way to benchmark our estimate. Generally, the dashboard has a more expansive definition of spacetech (including, for example, terrestrial drones, ground sensors, or eVTOL vehicles).
Dealroom estimates that in December 2024, 18 space-tech companies raised a total of approx. $512m USD. As of publication, the dashboard also includes 13 additional deals, worth $232m, which we classify as either not space-tech, or not venture capital. The VentureSpace list includes three companies not listed on Dealroom’s dashboard at time of publication: Shanghai Gesi Aerospace Technology aka Genesat, TMYTEK, and Solarcore aka Oros Labs.
Get in touch at [email protected] and we are happy to share more about our methodology, who’s included, who’s not, and more information about each investment.
