Washington-based rocket innovator startup Stoke Space raised $100 million in new funds, the company announced Thursday, as it aims to develop a fully reusable rocket called “Nova.”
Stoke’s latest investment round was led by Industrious Ventures – with the firm’s Steve Angel, chairman of chemicals giant Lindejoining the Stoke board of directors. The space company’s fundraise was also joined by investors including the University of Michigan, Sparta Group, Long Journey, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, YCombinator, Point72 Ventures, NFX, MaC Ventures, Toyota Ventures and In-Q-Tel.
Founded in 2019, Stoke had previously raised $75 million to date. A company spokesperson declined to comment on Stoke’s post-money valuation.
“The priority is to be able to keep the pedal to the metal and continue to develop in order to get to market as soon as possible and really fortify what is still a very fragile commercial space economy,” Stoke co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa told CNBC.
Stoke said it would use the new capital to fund the development of its first rocket, which the company has finally christened, giving it the name “Nova.” That includes the development of the first-stage engine and structure, an orbital version of the second stage and building out launch infrastructure at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The company recently completed a critical “hop” test of its reusable upper stage, successfully flying the development vehicle to an altitude of around 30 feet and vertically landing it about 15 feet away. While those numbers might seem unimpressive on the face of it, the hop proved out the stage’s novel oxygen-hydrogen rocket engine design. Unlike other nozzled rocket engines, the one on Stoke’s second stage is a distributed system, with thrusters that ring the circumference of the second stage.
The flight essentially concluded the development cycle of the second stage, meaning that the architecture is now complete and the company can move on to the rest of the vehicle’s structure. As Stoke co-founder CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch last month, the company had to finalize the architecture of the second stage before building out the rest of the vehicle.
“The first step on our journey was figuring out what a fully reusable upper stage and space vehicle looks like,” he said. “We really believe that it’s hard to build the rest of the vehicle until you know an answer. So that’s why a lot of our focus so far has been on the reusable second stage.”
The company also announced that multinational chemical company Linde plc’s chairman, Steve Angel, will join Stoke’s board of directors. Angel is the former CEO of Linde and also sits on the board of GE.