Relativity Space closes $500 million Series D funding round
November 23, 2020
Relativity Space, Los Angeles, California, USA, has closed a $500 million Series D equity funding round. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Baillie Gifford, ICONIQ Capital, General Catalyst, XN, Senator Investment Group, and Elad Gil.
Existing investors also participating in the round include BOND, Tribe Capital, K5 Global, 3L, Playground Global, Mark Cuban, Spencer Rascoff, and Allen & Company LLC, among others. In connection with the Series D financing, Allen & Company LLC served as Relativity Space’s financial advisor, and Fenwick & West LLP served as Relativity Space’s legal advisor.
According to Relativity Space, the Series D equity funding validates the company’s sector-leading momentum across commercial execution, technical milestones and talent growth. The funding will enable the company to accelerate its planned initiatives, including its factory of the future, launch vehicle development and Additive Manufacturing technologies.
“This past year drove change in every industry, including aerospace,” stated Tim Ellis, Relativity’s co-founder and CEO. “Throughout 2020, Relativity achieved unprecedented growth, attracted top talent, and stepped up to deliver results we could have only imagined when we started the company less than five years ago.”
“We are on track to launch our first Terran 1 rocket to orbit next year with existing capital on our balance sheet,” he continued. “With this new Series D funding, we will now dramatically accelerate the development of our long-term plans and look beyond first launch.”
Relativity Space explains that its radically simplified supply chain enables the company to build its orbital rocket, Terran 1, with 100 times fewer parts in less than sixty days. By fusing metal Additive Manufacturing, artificial intelligence, proprietary software, and autonomous robotics, the company states that its team is creating an entirely new value chain for aerospace, starting with orbital launch.
The company is on its way to launching what it states is the world’s first entirely additively manufactured rocket to orbit, the first step in a long-term vision to upgrade humanity’s industrial base on Earth and build one on Mars.
Ellis added, “Aerospace still relies on the same fundamental toolset it did sixty years ago when rockets were first launched to the Moon and global aviation was in full swing: giant factories full of fixed tooling, with complex supply chains and hundreds of thousands to millions of individual parts assembled one at a time by hand, using hundreds of diverse manufacturing processes.”
“What we are building at Relativity fundamentally rewrites that tech stack. At its heart, 3D printing is an automation technology, one that transforms physical complexity into software by stitching many components together.”
“The compounding rate of improvement and iteration possible through our disruptive approach will be unlike anything seen before,” he continued. “If we are going to live on Mars, it is inevitable that this factory of the future must exist to build humanity’s industrial base once there. At Relativity, we look forward to furthering an iconic new technology to build the future of humanity in space, faster.”
