- GV co-led a $30 million seed round into Nebex, a startup building a financial exchange for the space industry.
- Founder Tejpaul Bhatia is the former chief executive of Axiom Space, with a $1 billion-plus track record in commercial space deals.
- Nebex hasn’t launched yet, but a platform is due this summer, with full rollout planned by year’s end.
Tejpaul Bhati spent years closing space deals worth more than $1 billion as the former chief executive of Axiom Space, and he kept running into the same problem: nobody could move the money fast enough. Now Alphabet’s venture arm wants to fix that, for $30 million.
Nebex, founded in late 2025 and based in New York, has closed a $30 million seed round co-led by GV (Google Ventures) and Eniac Ventures, with 2048 Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Oceans Ventures, AIN Ventures and several other funds also participating. The company struck a new banking relationship with J.P. Morgan alongside the raise.
“We built Nebex because we’ve seen firsthand that ambitious space founders struggle to deliver complex sovereign programs due to the lack of capital markets infrastructure that supports revenue and cash flow. This is something that exists in nearly every other industry,” Bhatia shares.
That gap is the nut of the pitch. The space economy was worth somewhere between $470 billion and $626 billion in 2026, depending on whose estimate you trust, and most forecasters expect it to roughly double by the mid-2030s as satellite constellations multiply and commercial activity overtakes government spending as the dominant share of the market.
Falling launch costs and a wave of new entrants have widened access to orbit. The financial systems underneath those deals have not kept pace, still built around the handful of legacy contractors that used to run the industry, rather than the much larger and more international pool of companies competing for contracts today.
A founder who has seen the problem from the inside
Bhatia founded Nebex with Anand Subramanian, who previously built the ad-exchange startups ContextWeb and NimbleTV, and Manlio Di Stefano, Italy’s former vice minister of foreign affairs. The combination is deliberate: commercial space experience, exchange-building experience, and the diplomatic relationships that cross-border government deals require.
Nebex, founded in 2025, serves as an exchange layer among three groups: United States space technology companies, foreign governments seeking to buy or build space capabilities, and investors willing to finance transactions. A satellite company selling services to a foreign space agency might currently wait months for payment to clear, with no standardised way to finance the gap. Nebex wants to make that process more routine, as it already is in finance, energy, or logistics.
Notably, the company has built none of this around crypto or blockchain rails, a deliberate choice in a fintech landscape where tokenisation pitches are common. It will also not change the export controls, tariffs, or national-security reviews that slow down cross-border space deals. Its bet is narrower: making the deals that do clear worth the effort.
No direct competitor, but a crowded neighbourhood
There is no other startup running a cross-border space finance exchange at this stage, which says as much about how early the category is as it does about Nebex’s positioning.
The closer comparisons sit one layer over. Slingshot Aerospace, which has raised more than 100 million dollars for satellite tracking and space-domain-awareness software, is building the operational data layer that space companies rely on, not the financial one. Nebex is betting it can become the plumbing beneath the deals that those operational players eventually transact.
GV’s involvement carries weight precisely because of that kind of bet. The firm has previously backed Pipe and Alt, infrastructure plays in markets that hadn’t yet matured when GV got in early.
“True markets scale when the infrastructure everyone sees and the infrastructure nobody sees grow together. That’s the bet we’re making with Nebex. Tejpaul is a rare founder who actually knows how to move fast in a heavy, high-friction industry like space,” says Erik Nordlander, general partner at GV.
J.P. Morgan’s involvement adds institutional weight on the banking side.
“The space economy is at an inflection point, and founders like Tejpaul and his team are building essential infrastructure that expands access and accelerates innovation across the ecosystem,” Aneeka Sajid, market executive for innovation economy at J.P. Morgan, adds.
The fresh funding will go toward scaling the platform and the team, though Nebex has not disclosed current headcount or a post-raise target. What it has disclosed is a timeline: a preliminary version of the platform is expected later this summer, with a full rollout planned by the end of the year.
Bhatia has not yet put his own capital into the company. Brokering deals between sovereign governments and defence-adjacent firms is a legally dense territory, and whether buyers and sellers actually want a centralised exchange, rather than the bespoke relationships that have defined the industry for decades, remains untested.
If the space economy is really becoming a functioning market rather than a collection of one-off government contracts, it will need the same financial rails that every other industry already has. Whether Nebex becomes that rail, or just one of several companies racing to build it, is the question the rest of 2026 will start to answer.
