Most satellite startups are racing to build smaller. K2 Space is going the other way, on purpose. Investors just handed it $500 million to keep going bigger.
K2 raised a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ led the round, with Alphabet’s CapitalG, Lightspeed and ARK Invest among the backers. That more than doubles the $3 billion valuation it carried months ago. K2 has now raised over $1 billion, against more than $1 billion in signed contracts.
The bet is contrarian. Most of the industry shrinks satellites to cut launch costs. K2 argues the opposite: in orbit, power decides what a satellite can do, so it builds big, high-power ones instead.
The proof is already up there #
Its first “mega-class” satellite, Gravitas, reached orbit in March on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It weighs two tonnes, generates 20 kilowatts, and carried a dozen payloads for customers including the US military, GeekWire reported.
K2 builds more than 85% of each satellite itself. Its 180,000-square-foot factory in Torrance, California is designed to turn out up to 100 satellites a year. That in-house model, it says, is how it makes large satellites quickly and cheaply.
Defence is writing the cheques #
Much of the pull is military. K2 will supply 30 satellites for SES’s meoSphere network, build spacecraft for the Anduril-led Golden Dome missile-defence programme, and act as bus provider on a US Space Force satcom effort, its first Pentagon programme of record. It fits a wider surge of money into defence space.
The real moonshot: data centres in orbit #
The bigger bet sits further out. In late 2028, K2 plans a 100-kilowatt “Giga” satellite built to carry “massive amounts of compute on orbit.” In plain terms, that is a step toward AI data centres in space, an application its chief executive flagged to Bloomberg.
K2 was founded in 2022 by the brothers Karan and Neel Kunjur, the latter a former SpaceX engineer. The round lands amid a flood of money into space, from launch to defence to orbital infrastructure.
The risks are real. Building 100 large satellites a year is a manufacturing feat no one has pulled off, and space-based data centres remain years away and unproven. K2’s next mission, Trinity, flies multiple satellites in early 2027. Going from one satellite to hundreds is the bet. Whether orbit becomes the next data-centre site is the wager beyond it.
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