- K2 Space has closed a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ.
- The round pushes total funding past $1 billion, just four years after the Torrance-based satellite maker was founded.
- K2 has already signed over $1 billion in contracts with SES, Anduril and the US Space Force, saying that bigger satellites will win the next decade of space infrastructure.
For years, the commercial space industry has focused on launching more satellites. Brothers Karan Kunjur and Neel Kunjur believe the future belongs to building bigger, more powerful ones.
The duo founded K2 Space in 2022 after concluding that the next generation of AI computing, defence systems and global communications would require far more power and payload capacity than conventional satellites could provide. Their vision has now earned strong investor backing.
The company has raised $500 million in a Series D round at a $6.8 billion valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ, with CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, and T. Rowe Price Associates also participating.
The Torrance, California-based company’s total funding now tops $1 billion. That’s a big jump from its $250 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, which closed in December 2025. The valuation has more than doubled in roughly seven months.
“When my brother Neel and I started K2 four years ago, we took a contrarian bet that building bigger would be the future for exploring and developing space. This latest round validates that thesis and gives us the capital to accelerate scaling as we prepare to build up to 100 large satellites per year,” said Karan Kunjur, co-founder and chief executive.
Demand for orbital compute, secure communications, and missile-defence infrastructure has been growing faster than most satellite architectures were designed to handle, creating a gap K2 has spent four years positioning itself to fill.
Building satellites for the AI and defence era
K2 was founded by Kunjur, previously the commercialisation lead at AI startup Text IQ, and his brother Neel, a former SpaceX Dragon avionics engineer. The pair believe the industry’s decade-long push toward smaller, cheaper satellites, arguing AI computing, defence systems, and global communications would need far more power and payload capacity than small platforms could deliver.
The startup works by manufacturing large, high-power satellite buses almost entirely in-house, with about 85% of each platform built at its 180,000-square-foot Torrance factory, which is built to produce up to 100 satellites a year.
Its first satellite, Gravitas, launched in March 2026 carrying a 20-kilowatt Hall-effect thruster, reportedly the most powerful ever flown in orbit, at a build cost of roughly $15 million per unit. As of this raise, Gravitas was roughly 120 days into its on-orbit mission. K2 is developing a 100-kilowatt Giga-class satellite for large compute workloads, due in the second half of 2028, and plans to launch its next mission, Trinity, in the second quarter of 2027.
“In addition to expanding our factory footprint and growing our team, we’ll also be scaling up the satellite itself,” said Neel Kunjur, co-founder and chief technology officer.
The race for space infrastructure
K2 isn’t the only company chasing the new space infrastructure boom.
Impulse Space, founded by SpaceX’s first employee, Tom Mueller, raised $500 million at a $4.26 billion valuation in June 2026 to build orbital transfer vehicles that move satellites once they’re already in space. True Anomaly, a Denver-based orbital-defence spacecraft maker, raised a $260 million Series C in 2025 and reportedly closed a $650 million round in April 2026.
Unlike rivals, K2 builds the large satellite platforms that both categories run on. The same power-over-proliferation argument has shown up closer to home for TFN readers — Finnish satellite maker Iceye raised €150 million at a €2.4 billion valuation in December 2025, and Austin-based CesiumAstro closed a $470 million round in February 2026 to scale AI-driven space and defence communications hardware.
The global satellite manufacturing market continues to expand as operators and governments, including in Europe, where startups like NewOrbit are making a similar sovereignty argument around access to orbit, pour capital into communications, defence, and orbital compute infrastructure.
“Every important mission in space comes back to power and mass. Karan, Neel and the team solved the engineering challenges of a larger, more powerful platform and are now scaling production to meet growing demand,” said Lucas Oliveira, principal at Kleiner Perkins.
“K2 started from a simple insight: in orbit, power determines capability. K2 can deliver high power, high mass satellites at volume because they build more than 85% of their platform in-house. That vertical integration is what may take the company from one satellite to dozens to hundreds,” added Tengbo Li, general partner at ICONIQ.
What’s next
K2 will use the new capital to scale toward its 100-satellite-a-year target, expand its factory footprint, and build out the Giga-class platform, alongside an existing engineering office in the Seattle region opened earlier in 2026.
Karan Kunjur said that the company’s 85% vertical integration in its supply chain enables it to build large satellites quickly and at low cost, and that hiring engineers remains a priority as it scales. Current and post-raise headcount weren’t disclosed.
The round brings K2’s contracted backlog to over $1 billion, including 30 satellites for SES’s meoSphere constellation, a supply deal with Anduril, a company that also anchors a16z’s defence-tech thesis, for the Golden Dome missile-defence programme, and a slot as satellite bus provider on the US Space Force’s Protected Tactical Satcom-Global programme, K2’s first Pentagon programme of record.
