An innovative California-based launch company called Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media for several years.
The theory of relativity promised to disrupt launch by using a somewhat niche technology in the space industry of the time, 3D printing, as a basis for rocket production. The pitch worked. Relativity CEO Tim Ellis liked to brag that his first call was to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who cut the company's first check. Cuban invested half a million dollars.
That was just the beginning of the flurry of fundraising by Ellis, who turned privately held Relativity into a $4.5 billion company in November 2023 after its latest Series F financing. This was an impressive start for the company founded in 2016 by Ellis and Jordan Noone, both engineers.
A big bet
The Series F round took place when Relativity was in the midst of a bold gamble that, in retrospect, might have been a bad gamble. In March 2023, the company launched its Terran 1 rocket for the first (and only) time. After this flight, Ellis announced that the company would immediately move to development of the much larger and more capable Terran R rocket.
“It's a big, bold gamble,” Ellis said in an interview. “But it's actually a very obvious decision.”
With an advertised capacity of more than 1 tonne in low Earth orbit and a “backlog” of launch contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Terran 1 had the potential to generate significant revenue, according to Ellis. It could also have secured some of the launch contracts since won by competitors such as Rocket Lab, with its smaller Electron vehicle, and Firefly, with its similarly sized Alpha rocket.
