We’re pleased to announce we’ve just completed our analysis of the last quarters Space Tech Venture Capital transactions, amounting to $1.6bn in the period to 31st March 2019. Every quarter we carefully monitor the investment in the Space Tech sector globally over a rolling 12 month period, highlighting key investments from the Quarter. We’ve broken out the sub-categories of the Space Tech ecosystem and highlighted total investment and the average size investment in Seed, Series A and Series B. We’ve also compared average round sizes for US companies versus non-US based companies.The latest index demonstrates continued growth by VC investors globally. Total investment grew by 42% year-on-year expanding from $2.8bn to $4bn. Mega constellation OneWeb, who’ve now launched the first six of their space-internet satellites, successfully raised a $1.25bn C series round from backers including SoftBank. This enables the rapid roll-out of their planned 650 strong LEO satellite constellation.The index, which identifies average investment round sizes for each sub-sector, revealed that US companies continue to access materially larger rounds increasingly across Seed, Series A and Series B. The only sub-sector to continually buck this trend was Build (space hardware, software and engineering, materials, energy and robotics).The Data (constellation) sub-category has eclipsed Launch as the biggest recipient of investment. Record numbers of smallsat start-ups are successfully reaching orbit. The Data sub-category accounted for 47% of total investment ($1.9bn) versus 26% for the Launch sub-category ($1bn). With Amazon also announcing plans to deploy 3,236 satellites for high-speed global internet access the space race in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is well underway.
