Relativity Space Soars, Reportedly Landing a $500M Investment
Rachel Uranga covers the intersection of business, technology and culture. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Relativity Space raised $500 million to help it build its 3D rocket ships in a round led by Tiger Global Management, CNBC reported on Tuesday.
The raise, one of the largest this year for a Los Angeles startup, would reportedly value the company at $3.2 billion and put the region at the center of a new wave of high-value space companies.
Earlier this year, Hawthorne-headquartered SpaceX raised $1.9 billion at a reported $46 billion valuation.
Neither Relativity nor Tiger Global could be reached for comment.
Relativity was created by two twenty-somethings and seeks to revolutionize spaceflight by building the world's first 3D-printed rocket with its first iteration called Terran 1. The process is cheaper than traditional manufacturing and CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis, an alum of the Jeff Bezos-led space company Blue Origin, aims to eventually automate rocket-making on Mars.
Relativity has picked up steam recently landing a contract with Lockheed Martin to build 3D projectiles for an experimental NASA mission to test cryogenic fluid management capabilities, key to establishing a sustainable presence on the moon and sending crewed missions to Mars. And in June it struck a deal with the U.S. Air Force's 30th Space Wing to develop rocket launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Last year the company closed a $140 million Series C round led by Bond and Tribe Capital in October. Relativity is also backed by investors Playground Global, Y Combinator, Social Capital, and Mark Cuban.
Those funds helped build a new headquarters in Long Beach where the company is likely to expand the development of the Terran 1. It comes months after co-founder Jordan Noone resigned as chief technology officer and became an executive advisor in what he said was preparation for starting another venture.
Editor's note: dot.LA co-founder Spencer Rascoff is an investor in Relativity Space.
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