Loft Orbital co-founders. Alex Greenberg, left, and Pierre-Damien Vaujour, right. Photo: Loft Orbital 

Loft Orbital raised $170 million in a Series C round, the company announced on Tuesday, along with plans to scale operations incorporating inter-satellite links and more AI onboard its satellites. 

Tikehau Capital with Axial Partners co-led the round. Bpifrance, Foundation Capital, Temasek, and Uncork Capital participated as well. With this funding, Loft has now raised $300 million in total. Its previous funding round was a $130 million Series B in 2021. 

Loft’s model is to integrate customer payloads, both physical and virtual, onto its YAM satellites, which stands for “Yet Another Mission.” The company reports it has deployed tens of missions across five satellites, using its modular payload adapter and mission operations software. 

In the eight years since the company was founded, Loft reports it has crossed $500 million in lifetime bookings in hosting customer missions onboard its satellites. 

Some of its customers include NASA, Microsoft, BAE Systems, the U.S. Space Force, The French Space Agency (CNES), the European Space Agency, EarthDaily, Helsing, Eutelsat, and others. 

In the eight years since the company was founded, Loft reports it has crossed $500 million in lifetime bookings in hosting customer missions onboard its satellites. 

Co-founders Pierre-Damien Vaujour and Alex Greenberg explained their goals for the next stage of the company in a blog post announcing the round. The company plans to scale from launching a handful of satellites per year to more than 10, and become more of a go-to space infrastructure provider. 

Specifically, the company plans to launch satellites with onboard compute and inter-satellite links for real-time tactical data availability. 

“Very few satellites are used to detect and monitor events in real-time. We believe there is massive, untapped potential in utilizing satellites for tactical purposes. To do so, our satellites have to become smarter and more rapidly accessible,” the founders said. 

“With this round of funding, we will increase our focus on Horizon 2 by growing our ecosystem of AI application partners and making it seamless and eventually self-serve for anyone to deploy and run AI apps on Loft’s infrastructure,” they added.