Stoke Space Technologies announced the initial closing of a $1 billion Series E financing round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $2.3 billion. The round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other existing backers. The new capital will fund the imminent orbital debut of Nova Pathfinder, expand production capacity, and accelerate development of the larger Nova Block 2 launch vehicle slated for 2029.
The infusion underscores investor confidence in Stoke’s full-reusability thesis. “Stoke is pursuing what we see as one of the most important opportunities in space transportation: making launch fully reusable, reliable, and scalable,” said Chris Morales, Partner at Point72 Ventures. “We are proud to support Stoke as it moves toward flight and high-cadence operations.” Spark Capital’s Clay Fisher added, “Full reusability is the inevitable end state of the market, providing an order-of-magnitude cost and service advantage over partially reusable rockets.”
Series E Funding Details
The $1 billion round adds to a $510 million Series D raised in October 2025, pushing Stoke’s valuation to roughly $9 billion. Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital led the round, while a coalition of strategic investors broadened the capital base. The financing is earmarked for three core thrusts: final development and testing of Nova Pathfinder, construction of expanded manufacturing and launch infrastructure, and the design and early production of Nova Block 2.
Nova Pathfinder: First Flight Roadmap
Stoke’s Nova Pathfinder is the company’s first orbital launch vehicle, designed to demonstrate the full-reuse architecture that will underpin its product line. The two-stage rocket employs seven Zenith full-flow staged-combustion (FFSC) engines on the first stage and an actively cooled liquid-hydrogen-fed upper stage. A successful “hopper” test of the upper-stage engine system in 2023 validated the approach. Stoke is targeting early 2027 for Pathfinder’s inaugural orbital flight, after a series of structural, ground-system, and integrated stage tests at its Moses Lake facility.
“Nova Pathfinder is how we turn the promise of Nova into flight-proven capability,” CEO Andy Lapsa said. “Pathfinder allows us to learn quickly, reduce risk, and prove the hardest parts of a fully reusable architecture in flight.” The company plans to operate multiple Pathfinder missions throughout 2027-2028 while concurrently advancing Block 2 development.
Nova Block 2: Capacity for the Next Era
Building on Pathfinder’s architecture, Nova Block 2 will deliver up to 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit within a 5-meter payload fairing, slightly more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The larger vehicle will feature 14 Zenith engines on the first stage and a revamped upper-stage system with twelve independently throttled chambers, boosting thrust by more than a factor of five. Block 2 is slated for its first launch in 2029, with an aggressive production and flight-cadence ramp-up thereafter.
“The higher-capacity Nova Block 2 scales those lessons into the capacity and cadence our customers are asking for,” Lapsa explained. “We see value in having more than one way to serve the market, since some missions are particularly well suited to the Pathfinder configuration.”
Infrastructure, Production & Recovery Buildout
To support the dual-vehicle pipeline, Stoke is expanding its Moses Lake test site from 75 acres to 475 acres, adding propulsion test stands, vehicle assembly bays, and recovery assets. The company is also constructing a new payload-processing facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex-14 and developing an offshore recovery platform to close the reuse loop for both stages. These investments lay the groundwork for high-frequency, rapid-turnaround operations that the market has been demanding.
Why Zillionize Invested
Zillionize’s ethos is to back founders who are redefining capital-intensive industries through breakthrough engineering and scalable business models. We invested in Stoke’s seed round as part of the Y Combinator W21 batch because the company embodied exactly that kind of opportunity. Stoke is led by a strong team of experts with deep aerospace experience and an ambitious vision: making daily flights to space a reality. The company’s disciplined progress, from successfully testing its full-flow staged-combustion engine and demonstrating its actively cooled heat-shield technology to completing Stage 1 proto-qualification testing and earning selection for major U.S. Space Force launch programs, demonstrates its ability to turn that vision into reality. Stoke represents the kind of technically ambitious, potentially transformative company that Zillionize seeks to champion.