K2 Space closed a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion post-money valuation on July 30, 2026, cementing the El Segundo start-up's status as the best-funded large-satellite manufacturer in the United States barely four years after its founding.
Kleiner Perkins And ICONIQ Lead A Growth-Stage Space Round
Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ co-led the round, joined by CapitalG, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. The deal brings K2's total equity haul north of $1 billion since 2022 and lands seven months after a $250 million Series C priced at a fraction of the current mark.
CEO Karan Kunjur told Payload the jump is "purely based on multiples of next 12-month revenue." K2 has signed roughly $1 billion in customer contracts to date and doubled its bookings in the six months following the December raise, including a ~30-satellite deal with SES for the meoSphere MEO constellation, a slot in the Anduril-led Golden Dome missile-defense consortium and a Space Force Protected Tactical SATCOM-Global supply commitment via SES Space and Defense.
Gravitas Proved The Platform, Trinity Will Prove Scale
K2 launched its debut satellite, Gravitas, in March 2026 to validate its high-power bus in orbit. The company now plans Trinity in Q2 2027 — a triple deployment across LEO, MEO and GEO on the same platform to prove the design's cross-orbit versatility.
From SATCOM To Orbital Compute
Kunjur has telegraphed a bigger prize: on-orbit compute. K2 has designed components for a 100 kW spacecraft targeting an H2 2028 launch, betting that AI inference will migrate to space alongside the traditional imaging and comms workloads. The Series D capital funds production capacity for at least 100 satellites per year at the company's current facility, plus R&D to push wattage higher.
The round arrives as space capital rotates toward companies with revenue in hand, alongside deals like SpaceX's NROL-95 launch for the NRO, IonQ's $1.8B SkyWater close and the broader Series B-plus market for infrastructure plays.
Reporting based on coverage from Payload, PR Newswire, Bloomberg, Via Satellite and SpaceNews.