Satellite bus manufacturer Apex Space raised an additional $200 million in capital at a $2.3 billion valuation, the company announced Friday. This more than doubles the company’s valuation after it raised $200 million in September at a more than $1 billion valuation.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its manufacturing facilities in Los Angeles and further vertically integrate, as it reports increased demand for proliferated national security constellations.
The funding isn’t part of a formal funding round, Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon told a media roundtable on Thursday. Instead, Apex is taking on more capital as there’s investor demand.
The company’s Factory One is designed to build around 200 bus platforms per year and as the company scales up, it plans to add additional factories.
Cinnamon said the company is looking to vertically integrate more of the components onboard its satellite, and add more mission services for customers, to help customers with payload accommodations. He estimates that the Aries production line is 30% vertically integrated, and the Nova production line is more than 70% vertically integrated.
“The scale at which we’re looking to deploy satellite systems is fundamentally different scale than we would have envisioned 10 years ago, or even really five years ago. There have been suppliers that build great parts for the industry, but they were never really built to build these at the scale that we’re thinking about,” Cinnamon said.
“We’re going to get pretty much to 100% vertical integration as we continue to scale up and need to source just higher and higher volumes of parts,” he added.
While the company targets commercial missions, Cinnamon was upfront that the biggest opportunities for the company are for U.S. government programs and allied nations, saying that more than two-thirds of the company’s business is in national security and defense.
Some of the company’s business is undisclosed, but Cinnamon said that “nearly every single major defense prime is a customer of Apex.” Just this week, Apex was just named as a collaborator for Northrop Grumman to prototype technologies for space-based interceptors in support of the Golden Dome.
The company takes a volume manufacturing, productized approach to its buses, and does not change its platforms for customer missions.
