Space IQ: Q3 2024 Review

“Probably at least in U.S. markets, the optimism, the climate for U.S. private markets is probably at the highest it's been in the last few years. The Fed, the big news from a macro perspective is the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates by 50 basis points, which had an immediate impact on Wall Street, leading to record highs in the public markets. …but it’s already having an impact on dealmaking.”

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Chad Anderson

Hello and welcome to SpaceX capital headquarters here in New York City. I'm Chad Anderson, and I'm here with Justus Kilian. And we are, here speaking about what happened in Q3. Going through, the big events and talking about what helped, you know, what shape the space capital markets that we should be paying attention to. So, you know, the first thing that we like to do is to, talk a little bit about the macro, like what's going on in the background that is impacting, the space capital markets.

So, the first thing is that, venture capital continues to be, the majority of investment into this, category, into the space economy. It's coming from venture capitalists. So what is happening to venture capitalists is important to, everyone. And, it's really there's been a slowdown in venture generally, primarily due to the fact that there haven't been any liquidity producing exits, right. There's, been very little, positive M&A, very little, IPO activity. And this means that venture, the, the investors in venture capital fund are not getting any capital back to reinvest into venture capital funds for them to invest in startup companies. So that's, what's going on here. And that's why we're seeing a bit of a slowdown sort of generally across venture.

And at the same time, there's a couple of other things that are impacting it. Valuations remain artificially high. And the reason for that is because of despite, you know, the headwinds in the financial market, AI deals are sort of, muddying the waters, right? Because while there's been a slowdown, there's also been an uptick and an increase in AI deals.

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Chad Anderson

So, there's a lot of idles happening at very lofty valuations. Right. And at the same time, delayed fundraising for companies. So companies that raised at the peak in 2021 at these pandemic highs, during the zero interest rate period, they were marked up pretty significantly. They have gone a few years now where they have not raised another, priced round.

They've raised additional bridge round bridge financing from their existing investors, which often goes unreported. It doesn't show up in sort of the public databases and things like that. But that's how some of these companies have been surviving over the last few years. It's been a few years, right. Those bridge funds are starting to dwindle. These companies are being forced back into the markets.

And as they do, there's a bit of a reckoning, right? As they, you know, maybe they're they've maintained their lofty valuations, but, now the market sees them, you know, at a more subdued, more sort of, valuations that are in line with more historical averages. So, so those valuations are now starting to reset. And we're seeing sort of those reverberations.

Throughout venture. Right. So but at the same time, probably, you know, at least in the US markets, right. The, the optimism, the climate for US private markets is probably at the highest it's been in the last few years. The fed the big news, you know, from a macro perspective is the Federal Reserve, reduced interest rates by 50 basis points, which, had an immediate impact on Wall Street, you know, leading to record highs in the public markets.

That takes a bit more time to flow through to the private markets. But deal making, it's already having an impact on dealmaking. And, we're starting to see some recovery after a really sort of like lull, uninspiring, you know, a couple of years. So, what else happened in the macro markets that caught your attention?

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Justus Kilian

I mean, the interest rates was the big factor. It'll take time to ripple through to the private markets, like you said. One thing that I've been, you know, sort of focused on recently is why the US venture markets are so unique and so resilient. And it really goes down to that LP base. Right. And so you were highlighting them as sort of, you know, why they haven't received distribution.

So, you know, there's not more capital to deploy, but the US market is unique versus a lot of the Western world in that, large foundations, endowments, pension funds exist and consistently allocate money to venture capital. And so, you know, big firms have gotten bigger, even in sort of like the recent slowdown. And, that's very different from the way that, you know, the UK or Europe is able to fund their private markets, which is largely supported by government funds that come in and back a handful of select folks.

And so you know, there might not be the persistence in allocating capital into those market or the depth of capital to go from seed stage all the way to growth. It's sort of like pick a little, you know, strategic priority. So, you know, I think that makes the, you know, us pretty unique. And one of the reasons we are seeing such, you know, amount of capital deployed into AI companies is because it, you know, it is, an ecosystem that's really driving the development of that new technology.

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Chad Anderson

So, yeah. Good stuff. Okay. So it's talking about, valuations. Right. So according to our data, there are 47, space unicorns, which are companies that are valued over $1 billion. There's 47 of them that are held in private portfolios. Right. Which, cannot possibly be so we think that there's going to be some thinning of the herd, right, as these companies come back out to fundraise and their valuations reset.

And this is leading to record high consolidation, right? So we are seeing off the charts consolidation the number of companies that are being acquired. Is at historical highs we've never seen at this high, or only through three quarters. We're already at annual historical highs. But the average value of those transactions is also very near historical lows.

Right. So these are companies that are struggling to, raise additional capital that are, you know, have a limited options and are often getting acquired, you know, for their IP or their talent or something like that by an incumbent. So, so there is a little bit of sort of rubber meets the road or whatever appropriate, you know, sort of space equivalent of that is, that's going on right now.

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Chad Anderson

And so, despite some, some predictions that the IPO market would open up, I mean, we've seen some companies go public Astra scale public earlier this year on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We've seen a few others, solar foods, you know, direct listing on the Nasdaq Nordic exchange. So we're seeing a little bit here and a little bit there.

You know, there's some news earlier about Sierra trying to go public this year, but we haven't really it's been more of a trickle than anything else. Right. And I think, thinking about. Right, the the fed cutting rates like could have an impact here on, public offerings. You know, we do hope that that's going to that that's going to spur, some more IPO activity.

You know, will those be space companies right out of the gate or some other sort of technology companies? I don't know, I do think it's going to take some time for that to occur. So I don't know that we're going to see, you know, any big blockbuster IPOs before the end of the year. You know, it always be a happy surprise if we do, you know, we'll see our space go public this year. I don't know, I think that things will really start to pick up next year, but, thoughts on the exit market?

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Justus Kilian

I mean, everybody's waiting. So, we just need a couple to sort of, you know, break open the door and, and prove that, you know, multiple expansion is, investors are willing to pay for sort of growth companies. And until that time happens, investors are still waiting.

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Chad Anderson

You know, and the other point that I wanted to make that I'd just forgotten about was that, you know, space companies in particular. And one of the reasons why we might, it might take a little bit more time to see Space Company go public is because there's a lot that companies need to do to regain the trust of investors, right? I mean, some of the news that happened this quarter, Astra, you know, one of the big SPAC companies went public in a big sort of flurry of, of attention. You know, they lost 99% of their value, over three years since going public. And then just, you know, struck a deal to take the company private.

Again, we've seen others market, as a company who also lost 99% of their value over the same period, and has completely pivoted their business model. And Terran Orbital got bought for $450 million, which was, you know, just recently valued at 1.8 billion. You know, when it went public in 2021 and others are really struggling to, you know, others have gone bankrupt.

Others are, you know, wildly missing revenue targets. And these are not the types of activities and behaviors that public markets like to see. Right. And so we're starting to see that play out in the public, stock prices, although we are starting to see some separation between those companies and the ones that are actually performing. Right. Like, Rocket Lab is starting to, you know, get some wind in its sales.

And that's the company doing real things and really interesting company planet as well. So, we are starting to see some separation, some the market starting to differentiate between the companies that are performing, those that aren't. So maybe that's going to bode well for, future IPO candidates as well.

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Justus Kilian

I mean, the public markets are not the place that you want to be iterating and pivoting your business model. It's really the place you go to hone and scale your business and raise additional capital. And so we're seeing that play out. The companies that had good product market fit and growing. Yeah. You know, they're able to accelerate the companies that were very far from that. You know, are being, you know, sort of delisted. So yeah, that simple.

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Chad Anderson

Okay. So in probably the biggest news of the quarter, SpaceX launched a rescue mission to, to bring back the two astronauts from, that were stranded on the International Space Station after Boeing's, vehicles, their Starliner was deemed unfit to transport humans. So, this is kind of like, putting a pin in it for space-x.

I mean, they have done a lot of incredible things over the last, you know, ten plus years. For me, this is kind of it coming full circle, right? Thinking about the Commercial cargo and the commercial crew program, thinking about how, how different the world was when NASA awarded these contracts, when they gave Boeing twice as much money to develop Starliner.

Because it was, you know, well, this is the sure bet, right? And then let's take a flier and give a little bit of money to SpaceX to see what they can do. Like, this was just sort of a very triumphant moment for me, for, you know, in my head, when SpaceX has come full circle now and has gone from being the underdog to the, you know, really to the apex player in this category, you know, going and, and, really helping NASA out of a difficult situation.

So, yeah. But SpaceX also had a massive quarter, right? So, in addition to that, they just landed their, super heavy booster. Right. But that's a that actually technically happened in Q4. So we'll talk more about that then. You know, what we put on the cover, of the Z3 report was the Polaris Dawn mission.

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Chad Anderson

They launched four astronauts farther than anyone human humans have gone in 50 years. They facilitated the first commercial spacewalk. In this mission was a showcase of space X develop their own Eva spacesuits, which they used and appeared to work phenomenally. They also tested their Starlink communications in deep space to, use that technology, for comms for, you know, in orbit missions, which is also huge.

Then meanwhile, back here on Earth, they had, they hit 4 million subscribers on Starlink. They did a landmark deal with United Airlines. Airlines globally are just signing up for Starlink. And they also are very close to getting, Starlink certified for rail. So, you know, they've got like this great consumer business, and enterprise business for Starlink growing, which is also just massive for the company. Right?

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Justus Kilian

I think they successfully launched a couple hundred direct to device satellites now as well, which is going to open up a whole new growth curve for them within the satellite communications business. So. Right. Yeah.

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Chad Anderson

Anyway, massive quarter for SpaceX's massive, you know, recent weekend for SpaceX, just with a super heavy booster catching that with mega zilla, the super heavy launch of Europa Clipper, they were ready to bring crew eight back. But then the weather prevented them from doing that. You know, Falcon nine came back to fly, right. And this is just all in the first couple of weeks of, Q4. So now circling.

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Justus Kilian

Back to that, you know, for the 40 plus unicorns, when you look at the valuation map in our graphic, I mean, is SpaceX. Largest chunk of that, and for good reason. They just continue to execute at a level that nobody else can compete with.

Chad Anderson

Yeah. I mean, if you talk to anybody here at SpaceX Capital and you talk about, SpaceX and their valuation, I think everyone here on the team sees a ton of upside still. Right? Like they're not they're not done yet. So, right. So anything else we want to talk about in terms of, like, SpaceX's satellite communications?

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Justus Kilian

I mean, there. So you highlighted the United deal. There are a lot of there's a lot a ton of shakeup happening within Satcom. We actually wrote a very detailed report about how this shakeup was going to happen within the legacy providers as this massive amount of new capacity came online. Performant performance, much higher, lower latency.

And, you know, it was going to rattle the traditional players to the core. We wrote in detail about that in the Satcom playbook several years ago. And what was true, that is becoming much more clear and much more pronounced now. So it's a great piece of research and, you know, it really lays out where that capacity and the value proposition and all that work.

So, I'd recommend taking a look if you want to go deeper, on the dynamics that are shaping Satcom from the infrastructure to the battle at the distribution layer and ultimately the end use cases that are starting to benefit from it.

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Chad Anderson

Yeah. Great. So I also definitely want to touch on China. So they're an important piece of the puzzle. If you look at, global, investment in the space economy, we're over $300 billion invested in the 2000 unique space companies globally. 50% of that has gone to US companies. 25% of that is gone to Chinese companies, and 25% is the rest of the world.

Right. So, China is a big portion of what's going on here on the government and commercial side. The country's space, capabilities have grown at a breakneck speed over the past five years. In Q3, Shanghai, space. Com satellite technology city, they launched their first satellites of their g 61,000 sales. Constellation. Right. So they're constellation that is going to compete with Starlink.

And it's going to be tens of thousands of satellites provide low Earth orbit satellite, connectivity, a big piece of their, strategic investment and their strategic capability. You've seen how strategic, Starlink has been for SpaceX. And so they clearly, you know, so, but then, soon after the launch, the second stage broke up into 700 pieces, polluting low-Earth orbit with, you know, a bunch of debris.

Leo Labs was the first to track this and to make this information available. And, so safety has sort of been an afterthought, which is a bit concerning, especially given the fact that we know that there's a bunch more we're expecting much more activity in the near future right along, and other projects likely ramping up this year.

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Chad Anderson

SSE already has the next satellites like produced, manufactured, ready to go and launch. So we expect to see quite a few more launches, Chinese launches in 2024 and going forward and g SpaceX the space sector spinoff of the big car company, they build a lot of the cars that you know and love.

They now have 30 satellites in orbit which provide 24 hour coverage of 90% of the globe. Right. So this is a car company that has invested in, satellite communications capability, for their own proprietary network. Right. So they're growing in a bunch of different aspects. And so, anyway, lots going on in China as usual.

But what's really interesting is the Financial Times that some great reporting on, the economic slowdown and the crackdown on tech by the CCP, which has throttled the, the country's private sector, the number of startups founded in China dropped by 50 since the peak in 2018, and it's on track to be even lower this year. That is staggering.

That is just falling right off a cliff. So anyway, we're going to be watching closely to see how this sort of broader slowdown in tech in China impacts China's space ambitions. I mean, because a lot of it is government funded and a lot of big government push as it is in the US, right? There's a lot of space technologies that are essential for economic stability and national security.

And countries are investing in this as well as enterprises. Right. And as well as the private markets. And so, anyway, it's gonna be really interesting to see how this all plays out.

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Justus Kilian

Yeah. I mean, I think there's one point to add which is more on like the positioning systems that they're building. And so, you know, the Chinese constellation put up by Baidu, you know, is really delivering a high quality service, and has more capabilities and is sort of a much more modern architecture. Well, the United States, you know, who's had a monopoly in GPS for, you know, since the late 70s, has been slow and faced challenges around launching GPS.

Three, you know, even GPS three is already sort of outdated relative to what Baidu is doing. And so there is a, a shakeup happening within that when you when you look at the US DoD priorities for space technology over the coming years, GPS was going to be one of the government led initiatives. But recently, the Brazilian GPS program, announced five private sector partners that will be developing low-Earth orbit positioning capabilities, to, you know, potentially help augment and accelerate, you know, what's happening with GPS. So, it looks like, you know, the, the US is trying to rely more on commercial partners in that area. Given the rate at which, you know, China's innovating and deploying.

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Chad Anderson

Yeah. This is such an interesting point. So let's spend another minute on it because it's like, GPS was a natural monopoly for a very long time, like you mentioned. Right. And natural monopoly justice is the economist. So you know this already, but a natural monopoly is like something where the costs are so like outweigh the benefits. And so, like the incentive for other people to come in is like very low.

Right. And so there are a few areas of natural monopoly actually in the within the space economy, GPS was one for a long time. And but over, you know, recently there's more gas systems that have come online and you've got, you know, Russia has won, the Europeans have won. The Chinese have won. And a lot of these systems, like the the amount of time and energy and resource that has gone into this right, is significant for them to be able to compete.

And actually, you know, now they have momentum on their side. Meanwhile, the US sort of feels like we've been like, you know, resting on our laurels a bit, you know, we're kind of going from a standing start, you know. So, just because we've been out in front for so long, right? It's been the most capable system for so long, and it's still is fantastic.

But, BeiDou is, it's a multi orbit, system. There's GEO, high orbits, there's MEO middle orbits, and there's low Earth orbit satellites, as part of the BeiDou constellation. And that provides a lot of resiliency, and security. And so that's what, you know, with this, our resilient GPS system is like to sort of build some of that out, right?

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Chad Anderson

And to, benefit from all those different orbital regimes. There's but there's a ton more work to be done. Right. And actually, if you look at, one of our portfolio companies, Sean Gorman, CEO and founder of Zephyr, has written a couple of really great, opinion pieces in space news that are worth checking out because, the RFPs contracts to build out the Earth orbit, constellations, you know, we've got a zona is a portfolio company of ours, and they're competing in that.

But there's also a lot more to be done right in the handsets and actually, like, the resiliency of the signals and stuff. So anyway, if you want to dive deep and geek out on this, I would encourage you to, to check out those, those opinion pieces by Sean Gorman. Yeah. So, okay, so the other big area that we wanted to talk about, and maybe there's more, but the big area that I had it on my list was, AI and spatial intelligence.

Right. So, there has been an increase. So first of all, we have been operating in space for decades. We've had Earth observation satellites in orbit for decades, generating a ton of data, lots of images, lots of sensor data about the surface of our planet. This is powered a lot of our climate science. This is powered a lot of, a lot of, of the geospatial industry today to date.

We have more satellites going up all the time. Right? So, with space, removing the barriers to entry and making it more accessible and affordable to get to orbit. We've seen many, many more, Earth observation satellites and different sensor types going up into orbit. And in Q3, Max are, launched their Legion Worldview Legion satellites, which are incredibly capable satellites.

They provide most of the, Earth observation data to the US intelligence agencies. And they also just recently announced an exclusive, partnership to sell their, their commercial imagery from those satellites, from all their satellites, including their new Legion satellites. Through SkyWatch, another portfolio company, which is a a big win for Earth observation and getting access to, to really great data.

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Chad Anderson

Right. So anyway, the point is we have a ton of data and there's no way for you there's way too much of it for humans to be able to get our arms around and understand. Right. Unless we run it through an AI system. Yeah, that's the only way. So that's why this is such an interesting area of opportunity for us at Space Capital is we have massive, massive data sets, a new interesting data coming on-line all the time.

AI is a tool that we can now use to, to derive really useful insights from this data. So, there were, a few massive developments, in AI, in spatial intelligence in Q3, one of which Google is partnering with leading wildfire authorities to launch fires at, it's a new global satellite constellation to detect wildfires the size of a classroom.

So very small fires within 20 minutes. And the idea here is to be able to have a global warning system to identify small fires early so you can actually take action and do something about it. This is, step change capability that is enabled by muon space, another one of our portfolio companies that's working with, you know, Google and the More Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund, with this Earth Fire Alliance, program, which, is desperately needed. I mean, the number of wildfires going up, globally is, it's increasing all the time, and we just don't have the capability to, you know, understand and address.

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Justus Kilian

Yeah. Mga announced $700 million initiative to leverage AI for data labeling. They've said that training data is the new gold. And they sit on the largest repository of imagery and training data out there. So I think it's a really important indicator of, you know, how valuable AI synthetic data are going to be to actually unlocking the value of a lot of these new constellations.

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Chad Anderson

Yeah. So and the head of AI was actually speaking at our annual Space Capital summit. May you can see, though, that whole conversation on our YouTube channel, as well. So in case you want to dig a little bit deeper there, and they were on stage, with rendered AI, who is a portfolio company that has built a synthetic data platform for training AI. And they had a big announcement, this quarter, in Q3, they announced, deal with Ansys, that combines forces to, bring faster simulation of large environments to remote sensing professionals and computer vision for synthetic aperture radar. So Ansys, massive company not focused on space, focused on terrestrial markets here and bringing in this expertise from renders to help them make sense of, synthetic aperture radar, information from orbit to power their, terrestrial markets and their terrestrial customers.

You can read more about that. That's also very fascinating. And then, of course, the big news that we'd be remiss if we didn't mention is, Feifei Lee, the godmother of AI, and some of our students, do students from Stanford University have, come out, of hiding and there or stealth in their, announced, you know, their new project, World Labs focused on spatial intelligence with a massive, you know, war chest of funds. So, this is gonna be a fun one to talk about. What are your thoughts on World Labs?

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Justus Kilian

Yeah. I mean, so they raised 230 million across a couple of different transactions. The company's already now valued at more than $1 billion. And, you know, I think it's it's really interesting. We spend a lot of time thinking about this distribution layer, like how you abstract away the complexity of, you know, raw imagery and make it much more accessible.

And you don't often see this big of transaction or this big of step change. But what they're working on is, is really what they're calling large world models. So it's the ability to develop AI systems to understand and interact with 3D physical world. Right. And so it's incredible. So Feifei Li, she was the former head of AI at Google Cloud.

She's best known for her work on ImageNet. It's the data set that helped revolutionize computer vision. And so, you know, right now, this sort of, spatial intelligence capability that they're building a couple of our key researchers that came from Stanford and helped develop a couple of techniques. So one is called Gaussian splatting, which, was sort of the more traditional method of how we take 2D space and render it in a 3D world.

That team also developed a new capability, which is called Nerf. So this is neural radiance fields. And, you know, it's using machine learning to, take a 3D image and actually interpret, and then recreate it in a 3D context. And so there's a tremendous amount of opportunity that's going to come here. It's going to give us a much deeper understanding of our physical world. And I think has a huge potential to unlock the value of satellite imagery and all all different types of geospatial imagery for a whole new generation of companies to build on top of.

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Chad Anderson

I think, this opportunity in geospatial intelligence and taking, all of this data and applying AI, to a drive, useful insights, and to do really interesting new things with it is very underrated at the moment. It's just so interesting how, how much opportunity there is here. At least from our perspective, it's a key area of focus for us.

In our fund, we're actively deploying in this category. If you're building in this category, we definitely want to talk to you. We've invested in some really interesting companies in this space already. Which are all sort of like, compounding value for each other. Yeah. So anyway, this is an area that we're going to continue to look at, now and going forward, and if you're not familiar with it, I mean, you're missing out. So, we've made a bunch of materials available, on our website and through this report, you can also get access to them as well. So, what else can we cover?

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Justus Kilian

There's a couple of transactions that I think are really important and sort of indicative of where the bar sits for growth capital. So we are seeing growth capital come in. Importantly, the space has not had to raise outside capital equity financing since, 22. So over that period of time, you know, we've seen, infrastructure investments maintain a relative consistency.

So, what that means is new growth companies are coming in and filling that gap where, you know, space hasn't needed outside capital. And so in this quarter, I think that there's two really great examples of series B rounds that sort of show where that bar is at. So impulse space led by Tom Mueller. So this is space X is first employee.

They're building an orbital transfer vehicle. They successfully demonstrated the mirror platform last year. They announced Helios, which is their high energy kick stage capability that could take payloads to go. They've won a ton of DoD contracts. They're really building a world class team. And so they brought in $150 million and around that was led by Founders Fund.

So, you know, it's a great example of the milestones that you need to be hitting, particularly if you're looking at these sort of more emerging industry is a little bit higher risk, you know, truly world class teams, incredible technical milestones, strong revenue milestones, the ability to sell into the government.

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Chad Anderson

It's important to be addressing a near-term market. Two. Right, because there's a lot really interesting things and a lot of really interesting tech in these emerging areas. But you need to be addressing markets that exist today, right. And the market for what they're doing is now really starting to, emerge. Right. And so they're the right solution at the right time, which I think is an important, nuance to.

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Justus Kilian

Particularly in deep tech. So unless you can realize revenue going into your series B round and we're talking, you know, five, $10 million of realized revenue from doing some sort of critical work that you're associated with your product or service, you're not going to be able to raise that capital. And, you know, a lot of these companies that are thinking much farther out there just won't be the equity financing there to scale unless they can realize that revenue.

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Chad Anderson

So, absolutely.

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Justus Kilian

That's the unlock. Yep, second great example, which we already mentioned. But we should mention again is Muon Space. So you know, led by former skybox engineer and he's an operating partner at our firm, Jonny Dyer, you know, the company is designing, building and operating, mission tailored low-Earth orbit satellites. And, they secured, $100 million in, agreements in 2024 alone.

They flew their first satellite last year. You know, from back of sheet to orbit and, record time and, particularly for a highly complex, you know, satellite and, there's customers out there that are buying this capability and, that 100 million, you know, and agreements announced is a pretty high bar to, set for series B round.

So they brought in about $56 million in their series B round. And, again, really impressive team. You know, more talent aggregating that company, really strong revenue traction, really differentiated technology. This is what it takes to be raising gross rounds in the market right now.

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Chad Anderson

And to your point, right? I mean, that that, they were founded in 2021, they raised the seed round, they raise the series in 2022, and they raised a series B, you know, just recently, just in this last quarter. Right. So this is, again, regardless of market cycles, right, there is capital that's going to great companies that are doing important things and are addressing real markets and being able to prove these milestones.

So regardless of market cycles, we're still continuing to see really interesting innovation. I do think, like, you know, we started this off with that. I do think, you know, the Fed's cutting rates. I think that there is some, some tailwinds in the public markets that's going to flow through to the private markets. We'll see how that all plays out.

We're really excited to see how, we end this year in Q4. It's already been a really interesting year. I think we're on the upswing. And so, we will see you back here for, Q4 to see where we end up, in 2024.

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