WASHINGTON — Sierra Space has raised $290 million in a round led by Japanese investors, providing the corporate with additional funding to speed up work on its Dream Chaser vehicle and business space stations.
The corporate announced the Series B round Sept. 26, led by three Japanese investors: MUFG, Japan’s largest bank; trading company Kanematsu Corporation; and Tokio Marine & Nichido, the country’s largest property and casualty insurer. Existing investors also participated within the round, which values Sierra Space at $5.3 billion.
Sierra Space raised $1.4 billion in a Series A round in November 2021. The combined Series A and B rounds is the biggest for a business space company, Sierra Space stated in its announcement of the brand new round.
“As we transition our revolutionary Dream Chaser spaceplane into operations for NASA cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station, we focus our capital deployment to the event and operations of the primary business space station — the subsequent step in our in-space infrastructure — the expansion of our national security offering and scaling our space systems components business,” Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, said in an announcement.
Sierra Space is best known for its Dream Chaser vehicle, an initial cargo version of which is slated to launch next yr on the second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. The corporate has plans for a crewed version of the vehicle in addition to one for unspecified national security applications.
Sierra Space can be partnered with Blue Origin and other corporations on the Orbital Reef business space station, offering Dream Chaser in addition to an inflatable habitat module called Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE). The corporate recently accomplished a successful burst test of a subscale model of LIFE, allowing the corporate to proceed to tests of a full-scale version.
Junichi Hanzawa, president and chief executive of MUFG, said in an announcement that his bank was inquisitive about Sierra Space’s business space station efforts. “MUFG has decided to speculate in low Earth orbit to support commercialization, the creation of latest industries, and the resolution of social issues,” he said.
Sierra Space plans to work with its recent investors to expand its presence within the Japanese market. That features participation in an ongoing study by the Japanese space agency JAXA on low Earth orbit commercialization as JAXA prepares for the top of the International Space Station at the top of the last decade. Sierra Space has also been examining the feasibility of using Japan’s Oita Airport as a Dream Chaser landing site.
Privately held Sierra Space has offered few details about its financials. At an investor conference in June, Vice said the corporate had about $260 million in revenue in 2022 and a backlog of $3 billion. That backlog is now $3.4 billion, according the corporate statement in regards to the Series B round.
Vice said then that Sierra Space is a “revenue-generating, profit-generating company,” but didn’t disclose how much profit it made in 2022. The corporate, he argued, has “a really strong balance sheet and long-term investors that give us the capital that permits us to speculate in being a category winner.”