SpinLaunch raised $11 million but hoped to raise much more, a source said

Space startup SpinLaunch is raising funds again, although a source told TechCrunch that the company was considering raising a much more ambitious sum earlier this year.

The company has closed a funding round of $11.5 million out of a planned $25 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. SpinLaunch confirmed the funding to TechCrunch but did not comment on the amount raised. The last Series B financing of $71 million took place in 2022.

But a person familiar with the company’s plans told TechCrunch that the startup had been talking to investors about nine months ago in hopes of them joining in on a $350 million round at a $2 valuation billions of dollars would participate. In response to a question about this fundraising goal, SpinLaunch CEO David Wrenn said the numbers were “highly inaccurate and misleading” and that he was “pleased with our recently completed financing.”

SpinLaunch made a splash back in 2018 with ambitious plans to build a kinetic launch system as a cost-effective alternative to high-cadence rockets. Instead of launching a satellite vertically on a rocket, SpinLaunch proposes accelerating these payloads to high Gs in a vacuum chamber before launching them into orbit.

The company has made some compelling claims about its system: that it will be able to launch a satellite weighing up to 200 kilograms into orbit for just $250,000 and that it can launch up to 5-10 times per day . It made progress: SpinLaunch conducted 10 suborbital tests using a smaller version of the accelerator at Spaceport America in New Mexico, where it has a long-term lease.

The company is considering raising such a large sum to essentially compete with Starlink, said the person familiar with its plans. This plan was first revealed in 2021 when SpinLaunch filed an application with the FCC to operate a 1,190 satellite constellation to provide global broadband services from space. The company initially submitted an application to the US Federal Communications Commission for the constellation in November 2021 under the name of its subsidiary SN Space Systems. The company met with FCC staff last September to discuss the application, according to a document filed with the regulator by SpinLaunch’s former senior regulatory adviser Michelle McClure. However, it is unclear how close the company is to having its application approved.

There are signs that the ten-year-old startup is in a period of transition as it moves into commercialization. Last October, SpinLaunch hired two new board members, including aerospace executive Dómhnal Slattery as chairman (a new role). Then, in March of this year, those board members named Wrenn, the company’s former COO, as CEO, which SpinLaunch founder Jonathan Yaney held.

During the leadership transition, the company had quietly targeted a very small island in Alaska as the location for its first orbital accelerator. SpinLaunch signed a letter of intent about 18 months ago to express its intention to build its accelerator in Adak, Alaska. The Adak City Council later sent a letter of support for the plans to The Aleut Corporation, the Alaska Native Regional Corporation with which SpinLaunch has worked. Adak City Manager Layton Lockett confirmed to TechCrunch that the letter of support, sent April 17, was, however, the “final substantive update” on the city’s involvement with SpinLaunch or Aleut.

In his response to TechCrunch, Wrenn did not directly address the status of the satellite constellation application or plans to build an orbital accelerator in Adak. However, he added that the company met its investment and revenue targets this year and that the new funding “will help accelerate the commercialization of our breakthrough space technologies and advance SpinLaunch’s integrated suite of cost-effective, sustainable space solutions.”

SpinLaunch has big ambitions: building a massive satellite constellation and a kinetic launch system. But as is often the case in space, financing and execution are a completely different matter.