The successes of companies like billionaire-led Blue Origin and SpaceX have sparked billions or dollars of VC investment volume into space startups largely founded by their aerospace alumni.
Prior to becoming an investor, Asparouhov was a founder himself looking to get in early on the future economy. He says his startup San Francisco-based Varda wouldn’t have even been able to get started if it didn’t think it could stand on the “shoulders of giants” referring to Blue Origin and SpaceX. Varda, which recently closed on a $42 million Series A funding round in July, looks to tap into an area VCs are particularly interested in — space manufacturing.
Another area VCs are watching closely is satellites, which has seen the second biggest share of VC dollars after rocket companies — $1.9 billion invested in Q2 2021 alone — according to Space Capital data. Advances in building smaller, cheaper satellites that can be inexpensively launched have opened the floodgates to a whole slew of possibilities surrounding the spacecraft whether that's new ways to utilize them by existing companies or services surrounding them.
“The best analogy is as the personal automobile became more popular justifying investing into freeways made a lot more sense,” Asparouhov says. This was a recurring theme among venture capitalists that this industry is so early it has the potential to be a nesting doll of possibilities with each new advancement jumping off the progress of the last, all tracing back to the foundation laid by billionaires.
Alumni of billionaire space companies are looking to take what they have learned and apply the next layer to create business opportunities in the same way alumni from places like PayPal and Facebook went on to create successful companies like software-as-a-service company Asana or defense company Palantir, both now public after raising hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars.
Investors are careful to point out that there are still many areas of space that are more hype than reality — at least for now — like asteroid mining or Musk’s hope for those colonies on Mars. But sixty years after the original space race, the latest competition is the backbone of a future wave of innovation and the billionaires leading the way are bringing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs along for the run.
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