Dawn Aerospace has closed a $25M Series B at a $195M post-money valuation, the company announced Tuesday.
The New Zealand-Dutch space transportation company will use the new funds to accelerate development of its Aurora spaceplane, and to conduct an in-space refueling demo.
Balerion Space Ventures led the round, which drew investors from New Zealand, Japan, and the US, including Mana Ventures, ANA Future Frontier Fund, NZVC, and others. Dan Wallman, general partner at Balerion, will join Dawn as a board member.
Reaching new heights: Since its 2022 Series A of $20M NZD ($11.7M), Dawn has grown revenue from less than $3M to $15M+ and has cash-flow positive operations.
- Dawn now has 200+ of its flagship propulsion systems in orbit, up from 33 in 2022.
- Aurora reached supersonic speeds in November 2024, reportedly breaking a world speed record for the fastest climb to 20 km.
With the new funding, Dawn will attempt to make Aurora the first vehicle to fly above the Kármán line twice in one day. The goal is to begin operations with this Mach 3.7 capability in 2027, as part of Dawn’s $17M partnership with Oklahoma.
CEO Stefan Powell also sees Aurora’s potential stretching beyond space, opening doors into new defense markets, such as hypersonics.
In the loop: The new round will also fund an in-orbit refueling demonstration of Dawn’s satellite propulsion systems, named Loop. Loop seeks to overcome in-space refueling’s chicken-and-egg problem, in which satellite operators lack immediate incentive to pay for refueling hardware and servicing companies lack an existing market.
“Loop is all about leveraging the fact that we’ve already defined the propulsion hardware,” Powell told Payload. “We already deliver it at scale, and now we’ll be able to refuel it at scale in the late 2020s. So our ability to produce these propulsion systems means that we can seed the market years before we actually intend to refuel it.”
Dawn is targeting a 2028 demonstration for the service, and customers include companies aboard Royal Netherlands Air and Space Force satellites that are equipped with Dawn refueling ports.
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A bipartisan pair of senators introduced a bill last week that would consider allowing national security missions to tap into the commercial orbital data center craze.
Who: The Nodes, Enterprise Workloads, and Hybrid Operations, Resilience, Integration, Zero-Trust, Orbital Networks (NEW HORIZON) Act was introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO). Both senators represent states with prominent space interests, and serve on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee (which Cruz chairs).
Big picture: This bill would establish a pilot program that would allow the Pentagon to evaluate how it could use commercial orbital data centers and space-based cloud computing for national security missions.
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