MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
More than a dozen companies have either gone public through mergers with special purpose acquisition corporations in the last year or have announced plans to do so.
The Promus Ventures New Space Index, which includes many space companies that have gone public in the last year, is down more than 42% in the last three months.
Among those companies is Spire, which started trading at nearly $10 per share when it completed its SPAC merger in August.
He said the company was focused on using that cash to pursue applications such as aircraft tracking and weather data with a large total addressable market, or TAM.
“In the last year or two, you’ve had a lot of activity on the private side where rounds have been getting raised using SPACs as a stalking horse,” said Tom Gillespie, managing partner of In-Q-Tel.
“There is still plenty of capital out there for the right investment, the right team, the right business proposition,” said Nick Flitterman, the new chief financial officer of Mangata Networks, which raised a $33 million Series A round Jan.
“The space sector is 10 times more robust than in 2015 in terms of the quality of entrepreneurs, the quality of ideas, the quality of customers,” said Sunil Nagaraj, founder and managing partner of Ubiquity Ventures.
Collett agreed that there was still plenty of private funding available for space companies, citing as one example the $136 million Series D round raised by Iceye Feb.