K2 Space, the manufacturer of big, high-power satellites, has announced a $500 million Series D funding round at a $6.8 billion valuation. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ have led the round, with participation from CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price Associates, and other existing investors.
“When my brother Neel and I started K2 four years ago, we took a contrarian bet that building bigger would be the future for exploring and developing space,” said Karan Kunjur, Co-Founder and CEO of K2 Space. “This latest round validates that thesis and gives us the capital to accelerate scaling as we prepare to build up to 100 large satellites per year.”
“Every important mission in space comes back to power and mass, and K2 recognized that before anyone else,” said Lucas Oliveira, principal at Kleiner Perkins. “Karan, Neel, and the team spent four years solving the engineering challenges of a larger, more powerful platform, proved it in orbit, and are now winning major commercial and national security programs. This round marks the start of their next phase, scaling production to meet the demand and becoming critical infrastructure for an era of abundance in space.”
“K2 started from a simple insight: in orbit, power determines capability. With Gravitas now on orbit and operational, K2 is beginning to prove out its thesis. K2 can deliver high power, high mass satellites at volume because they build more than 85% of their platform in-house. That vertical integration is what may take the company from one satellite to dozens to hundreds. We believe space will be one of the defining frontiers of the coming century, and K2 is building the platform to power the next generation of the space economy,” said Tengbo Li, General Partner at ICONIQ.
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With this latest round, K2 had cumulatively raised over $1 billion in capital and secured over $1 billion in signed commercial and government contracts to build the largest, high-power and high-payload-mass satellites currently flying in space for initiatives such as:
- The “meoSphere” network planned by commercial satellite provider SES, for which K2 would provide an initial tranche of 30 satellites.
- The Golden Dome for America space-based interceptor missile defense program, in which K2 would provide satellites to its program partner, Anduril.
- The Space Force’s Protected Tactical Satcom-Global program, for which K2 would be the bus provider, marking K2’s first selection for a Pentagon program of record.
“We’ve carefully planned and positioned our infrastructure, supply chain, and talent pipeline to meet the significant production demand from our customers,” Karan continued. “Our 180,000 sq ft factory in Torrance, California, is designed to manufacture up to 100 satellites per year. Our supply chain is 85 percent vertically integrated, which allows us to build our large satellites quickly and at low cost. We also continue to attract the most brilliant engineers and technicians who want to come work on the hardest challenges in space.”
“In addition to expanding our factory footprint and growing our accomplished workforce, we’ll also be scaling up the satellite itself,” said Neel Kunjur, K2 Space Co-Founder and CTO. “We’ll be introducing our 100kW Giga-class satellite in the second half of 2028, which will be the foundational platform for deploying massive amounts of compute on orbit.”
In addition to building and deploying the Giga satellite, K2 had focused on delivering large constellation orders on schedule for its customers’ planned programs over the next 24 to 48 months. K2 Space’s next mission, Trinity, would launch multiple satellites in Q2 2027.
“As space infrastructure becomes a key factor in customers’ missions, K2 will continue to invest in research and development that gives our large platforms a key advantage in the satellite market,” Karan continued. “Designing this cutting-edge platform, and then building it reliably and repeatedly, will allow us to best serve our customers as the leading manufacturer of large, high-power satellites.”
