Stoke Space Raises $1 Billion Series E for Fully Reusable Rocket

Stoke Space Technologies announced on September 8, 2026 the initial closing of a Series E financing round of approximately one billion dollars, bringing the company's cumulative funding to 2.3 billion dollars. The round was co-led by Point72 Ventures, the technology investment platform tied to hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, and Spark Capital. Existing investors including Glade Brook Capital, US Innovative Technology (USIT), Woven Capital, and Y Combinator also participated. The deal values the Kent, Washington-based startup at roughly nine billion dollars on a pre-money basis.

The raise is the latest signal that capital markets remain eager to back a credible SpaceX alternative — even one that has not yet flown an orbital mission. Stoke is the third company this year to receive a mega-round for reusable launch development, following funding events from The Exploration Company in Europe and continued investment in Rocket Lab's Neutron program. What sets Stoke apart is its uncompromising bet on full reusability: both stages of its Nova rocket are designed to return and fly again, a feat that even SpaceX has not yet achieved with Starship.

A founder's second act after Blue Origin

Stoke was founded in 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, both veterans of Blue Origin's propulsion division. Lapsa holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan and spent over a decade at Blue Origin, where he served as program director for the BE-3 and BE-3U engines and contributed to the BE-4 development. Feldman brought additional experience from SpaceX's Merlin engine team. The company went through Y Combinator in 2021 and has since grown to roughly 400 employees across facilities in Kent (Washington), Moses Lake (Washington), and Cape Canaveral (Florida).

The board includes Hans Koenigsmann, one of SpaceX's earliest and most influential engineering hires, who joined Stoke's board in 2024. That lineage matters: Stoke is not a group of outsiders attempting to crack orbital launch for the first time. Its leadership has built and flown engines at the two companies that defined the modern reusable rocket era.

The Nova architecture

Stoke's first vehicle, the Nova Pathfinder, is a medium-lift rocket designed for both technology validation and commercial service. In reusable configuration it delivers approximately three tons to low Earth orbit; in expendable mode that figure rises to about seven tons. The first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines — full-flow staged-combustion cycle engines running on LNG and liquid oxygen, producing over 700,000 pounds of thrust combined with a specific impulse of 345 seconds. The second stage uses an Andromeda engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in an expander cycle, with 24 small thrust chambers arranged around the perimeter of the heat shield.

The defining technical choice is that second-stage heat shield. Rather than the ceramic tiles that SpaceX uses on Starship — which must be individually inspected and replaced after each flight — Stoke employs an active regeneratively cooled metallic heat shield. Liquid hydrogen flows through channels in the shield structure, absorbing the heat of reentry and simultaneously feeding the engine. Theoretically this enables faster turnaround between flights, since there is no ablative or friable material to inspect and replace. Lapsa has noted that the system can carry excess coolant to overcool the vehicle surface during early flights, providing a conservative safety margin.

It is a design that has never been flight-tested through orbital reentry. Stoke conducted a ten-meter hop test with its Hopper2 prototype in September 2023, validating differential steering, the active cooling system, and landing legs at low altitude and low speed. The Zenith engine completed its first successful hot-fire in June 2024. But the thermal environment of a hypersonic reentry from orbit is orders of magnitude more severe than anything demonstrated to date.

Two generations, two market windows

The Nova Pathfinder is the first-generation vehicle, targeting a maiden orbital launch in early 2027 — a timeline that has already slipped from an earlier target of late 2026. The first confirmed customer is AstroForge, a startup pursuing asteroid mining. Stoke has also secured Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the historic pad from which John Glenn flew in 1962.

The larger Nova Block 2, scheduled for a first flight in 2029, is the vehicle that Stoke's investors are ultimately underwriting. With a five-meter fairing and approximately fifteen tons of LEO payload capacity in reusable mode, it is sized to compete directly with SpaceX's Falcon 9. That positioning is deliberate: Elon Musk has stated that Falcon 9 will be retired around 2029 as Starship ramps up, potentially creating a supply gap for third-party satellite operators who do not want to queue behind SpaceX's internal Starlink missions. Stoke's leadership has emphasized that regardless of whether Falcon 9 actually retires on schedule, the space economy scales only as fast as launch providers serving external customers can increase flight rates.

National security and the funding landscape

Stoke's appeal extends beyond the commercial launch market. The company has been selected for the U.S. Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, which carries a contract pool of approximately 5.6 billion dollars, as well as an OSP-4 contract valued at 986 million dollars. The participation of USIT — a fund with explicit national-security orientation — as lead investor in the Series D round reflects the strategic dimension of Stoke's trajectory.

The same day Stoke announced its Series E, European competitor The Exploration Company disclosed 450 million dollars in new funding for its own reusable spacecraft. Goldman Sachs projects that as many as 70,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites will be launched over the next five years, most with operational lifespans of only three to five years requiring continuous replenishment. That demand forecast, combined with the perception that SpaceX prioritizes its own Starlink constellation over external customers, has created a funding environment where investors are willing to place nine-figure bets on companies that have not yet reached orbit.

What remains unproven

The risks are substantial. A nine-billion-dollar valuation on a company with zero orbital flights is a wager on technical execution, not financial performance. The active cooling heat shield — Stoke's principal technical differentiator — has survived ground testing and a low-altitude hop but has never encountered the thermal loads of an orbital reentry. If the design does not perform as predicted at hypersonic velocities, the entire architecture may need to be rethought. The 2027 Pathfinder target is already a revised date, and further delays are common in launch vehicle development. The Series E was described as an initial closing, meaning additional capital may still be raised in this round.

Lapsa's framing is straightforward: every mature transportation system is built around fully reusable vehicles, and space transportation will be no different. Whether Stoke can be the company to deliver that future — and deliver it on a timeline that justifies a nine-billion-dollar valuation — will be answered on the launch pad at LC-14.