Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the company's first-ever outside capital raise is not closed yet and is drawing heavy investor interest, describing the funding round as "oversubscribed."
"I'm so amazed the investor community embraces space this much. … They know that space is kind of infinite and the possibilities of putting commercial things in space, and it is a testament to the tailwind of raising this round," Limp said at the Trump administration's "Hello, America" tech summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company had already raised $10 billion at a valuation of $140 billion. Jeff Bezos chipped in $2 billion in the current raise, according to the WSJ, and has invested $30 billion since the company's founding in 2000.
Limp did not confirm the final numbers or how much Bezos has invested.
The 26-year-old space company, which was started by Bezos, has been fully funded by the Amazon founder up until now. Limp said the move to engage the investor community marks a significant shift for Blue Origin as it looks to ramp its operations and bring ambitious new technologies online.
"I'm of the firm belief this will be the best investment Jeff has ever made, and by the way, he has some good ones on his track record," he said.
Why now
Investors have flocked to space companies this year, both in private and public markets.
SpaceX's historic IPO in June further established the sector and brought attention to a commercial space economy poised to grow dramatically in the coming years.
Limp said a "combination of things" led to the decision to engage with the investor community now. Those factors include Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket that has already flown multiple times, the unveiling of two ambitious satellite constellations and the need to attract and retain talent.
"Attracting great talent … is difficult in a competitive world, and obviously having an external valuation on the company that shows employees what the value is is very helpful," he said.
Return to Flight
Early last year, Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn reached orbit on its first flight, and last fall, landed its booster on the second mission. In April, a third mission saw mixed success as the booster landed, but the payload – a satellite for AST SpaceMobile – was deployed in the wrong orbit and ultimately lost.
In late May, New Glenn suffered a catastrophic explosion on Blue Origin's Cape Canaveral launch pad, causing extensive damage that the company has been working around the clock to repair.
Limp confirmed on Tuesday that the plan is still for New Glenn to return to flight before the end of this year. He also said 1,000 people are working on the pad – 500 on the day shift, 500 on the night shift – as the company works around the clock to stick to that schedule.
The satellite constellation plans also give investors a clearer view of where the company is headed.
TeraWave, unveiled in January, is a planned communications satellite service that would cater specifically to enterprise, data center, and government operations, rather than supply broadband to consumers. It would entail a constellation of more than 5,400 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Project Sunrise, disclosed in March, would deploy a staggering sum of about 56,000 satellites capable of handling artificial intelligence computing from space.
In some of his most detailed comments outlining Blue Origin's orbital data center strategy, Limp said the idea is to deploy many of the heavy data centers into sun-synchronous orbit, where solar is a constant source of power, using New Glenn rockets.
Limp said the orbital data centers won't have much communications capability, but will instead connect into TeraWave to deliver results back down to Earth, enabling access to "effectively infinite compute."
The company, he said, is looking to drive a rocket launch cadence that ramps from hundreds to thousands of missions per year.
"Our mission at the company is to make an economy in space, get millions of people working and living in space," added Limp. "That's the 100-year vision, but it allows us to move heavy industry off the planet, turn this planet into a park."
For the first time, investors will help bankroll that mission.