Fresh off the success of its first mission, satellite manufacturer Apex has closed $95 million in new capital to scale its operations.
The Los Angeles-based startup successfully launched and commissioned its first spacecraft, a model called Aries, in March.
The company is on track to manufacture five Aries this year alone, Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told TechCrunch.
Apex was founded on the thesis that the one of the main bottlenecks facing the growth of the space industry was satellite bus manufacturing.
The company is approaching fifty people and that number is likely to double by the end of this year.
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Apex Space just moved one step closer to its goal of upending satellite bus manufacturing, with the startup announcing on Tuesday that its first vehicle is healthy on orbit.
The company launched its first satellite, the first of a class Apex is calling “Aries,” on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission on Monday.
“That will be incredibly valuable over the next many years while the satellite stays in orbit,” Cinnamon said.
Apex, whose backers include Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital, is building productized satellite buses to solve the satellite bus “bottleneck” facing the space industry.
In addition to Aries, an ESPA-class spacecraft bus that can support payloads up to 100 kilograms, the company is also developing two larger bus product lines, Nova and Comet.
When Apex Space emerged from stealth last October, the company had a provocative goal: remove the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry by manufacturing satellite buses at scale.
To get there, Apex announced today that it has opened a new headquarters and production facility in California that will eventually scale up to manufacture 50 satellite platforms annually.
Apex wants to disrupt one of the more entrenched parts of the space industry.
In general, satellite buses have been built to order at a very high cost and with very long lead times.
Apex is planning on flying its first Aries on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
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