A Rocket That Has Never Flown Just Raised $1 Billion — And Investors Are Betting It's Worth It

Most companies need a working product before raising a billion dollars. Stoke Space just did it with a rocket that hasn't reached orbit once.

Stoke Space, a Kent, Washington-based rocket company, announced Tuesday it has completed the initial closing of a $1 billion Series E financing round, bringing its total capital raised to $2.3 billion. The round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator, and other investors.

The company is developing Nova, a fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle designed to compete for the kind of market share currently dominated by SpaceX's Falcon 9 — a rocket that, notably, is itself on the road toward eventual retirement, according to Space.com's reporting. Unlike partial-reuse systems that recover only a rocket's first stage, Stoke's approach targets full reusability across both booster and upper stage — a considerably harder engineering problem, but one the company's leadership sees as essential to genuinely lowering launch costs over time.

"Every mature transportation system is built around fully reusable vehicles," said co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa. "It's the only way to reach the cost floor while scaling availability. Space transportation will be no different."

The immediate near-term goal is Nova Pathfinder, Stoke's first orbital vehicle, capable of carrying three metric tons to low Earth orbit. Its first flight is targeted for early 2027, and the vehicle is designed specifically to prove out the company's full-reuse technologies — including a heat shield that circulates super-cooled liquid hydrogen for thermal management — before a larger vehicle enters service. Lapsa told TechCrunch that testing has now progressed to the point where the launch pad and rocket have each been independently verified, with integrated testing of the two systems as the next step. Multiple Pathfinder vehicles are currently in production.

The new funding also unlocks a bigger ambition: Nova Block 2, a larger vehicle capable of delivering 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit within a 5-meter payload fairing, targeted for its first launch in 2029. Block 2 shares its core engine and heat shield architecture with Pathfinder, building directly on technologies the smaller vehicle is set to validate in flight first.

To support the expanded roadmap, Stoke is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, roughly 175 miles east of its Kent headquarters. "We have confidence in the foundation that we've laid today, and now it's time to scale," Lapsa told GeekWire.

Founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers, Stoke's development work has been backed by a mix of government and private partners over the years, including the US Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, alongside its recent run of major private funding rounds.

For investors, the bet is straightforward, if inherently risky: Stoke hasn't flown a single orbital mission yet, but the reusable launch market it's chasing — currently dominated almost entirely by one company — represents exactly the kind of high-stakes, high-reward opportunity that keeps drawing billion-dollar checks toward companies still years from proving their core technology actually works at scale.

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