Blue Origin reportedly raising $10 billion at $130 billion valuation

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin is raising $10 billion at a $130 billion pre-money valuation from Coatue Asset Management, Bezos himself, and other large investors, The New York Times reported. Coatue is expected to invest about $4 billion of the round, which would be Blue Origin’s first external fundraise. Bezos is said to be committing $2 billion, with the remaining funds coming from the other investors, according to the report.

The raise would follow a major setback for the company: its flagship rocket, New Glenn, exploded during testing in late May while it was preparing for its fourth launch. As of last week, Blue Origin hadn’t nailed down the cause of the explosion, but it still intends to fly the rocket again later this year. The company also needs to rebuild its launchpad in Cape Canaveral. That pad is the only one that can support New Glenn, which is one of the most powerful launch vehicles in the world today, so the rebuild sits directly on the path back to flight and underscores how much is riding on a single facility.

Getting New Glenn operational is a top priority for Blue Origin, especially now that the company has refocused its efforts entirely on supporting NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon — a shift that makes the rocket’s reliability central to the company’s near-term mission, not just one program among several. Beyond Artemis, Blue Origin also harbors ambitions to launch and operate data centers in space, capitalizing on a budding movement that seeks to move massive amounts of computing capacity to orbit. Some of the new funding might also support the company’s satellite internet network, revealed earlier this year, which would use thousands of satellites to provide data connectivity to enterprise, government, and data center customers — a second frontier alongside the core launch business.

The funding talks follow SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO last month, in which the AI/data-center/space company raised more than $85 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Coming so soon after that IPO, a $130 billion valuation for Blue Origin would mark another large bet on the commercial space sector from major investors, even as the company works through the aftermath of New Glenn’s explosion.

Why it matters

A raise of this size would give Blue Origin the capital to absorb the New Glenn setback and rebuild its only launchpad while chasing capital-intensive bets in space data centers and satellite internet — signaling investors still expect the launch-services market to keep growing despite the recent explosion.