A rocket company based in Kent, Washington has closed a $1 billion funding round that values it at roughly $10 billion, money the company says will speed up development of its debut Nova Pathfinder rocket while also financing a larger successor vehicle. Stoke Space, founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, has now raised $2.3 billion since it was founded, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Series E round was led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, according to KSL.com, whose reporting forms the basis of most of the financial and technical details in this story. Company co-founder Andy Lapsa said the fresh capital will help finance Nova Block 2, a bigger vehicle the company plans to build for replenishing satellite constellations, on top of speeding along the smaller Pathfinder version already in the works.
A Bigger Rocket Follows the First
Nova Pathfinder, whose debut flight is planned for 2027, already has a mission manifest that is fully booked for the next couple of years, the outlet reports. Stoke Space is in early discussions with customers for the follow-on Nova Block 2, which has been in development for over a year and is expected to make its first launch in 2029.
Block 2 will use 14 Zenith engines, twice as many as Pathfinder, and is designed to carry more satellites at once. Lapsa said customers are moving up in both the size and quantity of their spacecraft, and the company expects that trend to continue as it built the larger rocket to keep pace. Stoke Space plans to keep Pathfinder in service even after Block 2 debuts, with Pathfinder aimed at dedicated satellite missions or batches of smaller satellites.
Reusability Is the Whole Pitch
Stoke Space uses a fully reusable rocket strategy, an approach the broader launch industry has been chasing since SpaceX proved out reusable first-stage boosters with Falcon 9 — still the world's most active launcher, per the same outlet's reporting. Where Stoke differs is its attempt to also reuse the upper stage, the part of nearly every operational rocket today that gets thrown away after each flight.
The company's reusable upper-stage design swaps out traditional sacrificial thermal tiles for an actively cooled metallic heat shield that circulates liquid hydrogen propellant during re-entry, according to Stoke Space. That approach sidesteps the tile degradation that has historically slowed down turnaround times for reusable spacecraft. The company first funded this research back in May 2020 with a $225,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation, according to Wikipedia's entry on the company.
The reusability tradeoff comes with a payload cost. A reusable Pathfinder can lift 3 metric tons to low Earth orbit, while an expendable version can lift up to 7 metric tons — still less than half as powerful as SpaceX's partially reusable Falcon 9, though more powerful than Firefly Aerospace's expendable Alpha rocket, per the KSL.com report. A fully reusable Nova Block 2 is expected to lift up to 15 metric tons to low orbit, while an expendable version of Block 2 is expected to lift about 23 metric tons.
Testing Grounds Grow in Eastern Washington
Much of that hardware gets tested far from Kent. Stoke Space is expanding its rocket testing facility at the Moses Lake Test Site in eastern Washington from 75 acres to 550 acres to accommodate testing for the larger rocket hardware, according to GeekWire. It was at Moses Lake in September 2023 that Stoke completed a 15-second vertical takeoff and vertical landing test of its Hopper2 prototype, reaching an altitude of 30 feet to test upper-stage landing and control systems, as the Basin Business Journal reported at the time.
The company followed that with the first successful hot-fire test of its first-stage Zenith engine in June 2024, per Wikipedia. Stoke Space operates out of a 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, a hub that has become part of the Puget Sound region's growing footprint in commercial aerospace manufacturing.
A Historic Pad and a Defense Contract
Nova's launches and landings are slated for historic Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the same pad where John Glenn launched into orbit in 1962, allocated to Stoke Space by the U.S. Space Force in March 2023. The company also landed a spot on the Space Force's $5.6 billion National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 framework in March 2025, a designation that lets it compete for military payload contracts.
Stoke Space's board has grown alongside its ambitions. Technology executive Kevin Weil, who serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy, joined Stoke Space's board of directors in July 2026, joining other members including former U.S. Space Command Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. John Shaw.
Before the Series E round, Stoke Space had already extended its Series D funding round in February 2026 to $860 million, after initially raising $510 million in October 2025 led by Thomas Tull's US Innovative Technology Fund, according to Business Wire. That capital reportedly went toward Cape Canaveral pad construction and expanding factory tooling.
The company's rise comes as the global launch market has experienced soaring demand, with rocket reusability cutting the cost of accessing orbit by tens of millions of dollars compared with traditional expendable rockets, per KSL.com. Stoke Space is not alone in chasing that math: SpaceX is developing Starship as a fully reusable rocket it plans to eventually use to replace Falcon 9, while Rocket Lab is developing its own mostly reusable Neutron rocket. Whether Stoke Space can keep Nova Pathfinder on track for its 2027 debut, and whether construction at Launch Complex 14 wraps in time to support early launches, remains to be seen as the company works to scale toward the larger Block 2 vehicle.
