Thomas d'Halluin, managing partner of Airbus Ventures, in Hangar One at Moffett Field at NASA Ames Research Center in California.
Airbus Companies
Airbus Ventures, one of the most prolific investors in space startups, has raised a $155 million fund that plans to invest in the burgeoning space sector as well as the broader “deep tech” ecosystem.
“This fund is designed to unlock new possibilities, and space is one of them,” Thomas d'Halluin, managing partner at Airbus Ventures, told CNBC.
The move comes at a time when investment in the space industry, especially from venture capital, has been recovering after two lean years.
Airbus Ventures’ new “Fund-Y” focuses on long-term opportunities in early-stage deep tech startups, which d’Halluin defines as “going back to the laws of physics and not being afraid of the difficult.” Historically, deep tech is a classification for companies working on technologies that face high scientific or engineering hurdles.
Founded in 2016, Airbus Ventures takes a different approach to traditional venture capital firms. The firm maintains a gap with respect to its namesake corporation, the European aerospace company, with more than half of Fund-Y coming from external capital, such as institutional investors, private equity funds and family offices.
Airbus Ventures currently has $465 million under management, and Fund-Y is its fourth fund to date.
Around a third of Airbus Ventures' capital deployed so far has been in the space sector, the firm said, backing 14 pure-play companies in the sector, with notable investments including propulsion startup Impulse, lunar cargo company ispace and tracking service LeoLabs.
“It's a question of patience. Often, and too often, people want an immediate reward. Space is not a place of immediate reward,” d'Halluin said.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket booster lands on the company's barge after launching the Spaceflight SSO-A mission.
SpaceX
He stressed the importance of funding founders with the “extremely rare” trait of great execution, and highlighted Airbus Ventures' backing of Impulse, the startup founded by Tom Mueller, best known for developing SpaceX's family of rocket engines.
“Impulse was successful on its first mission thanks to Tom's 17 years of experience at SpaceX,” d'Halluin said.
“That element of human capital that we often see neglected in deep tech diligence — this notion of who captures the execution, the knowledge and the skill set at a particular company — is what we're targeting,” he added.
Although Airbus Ventures has traditionally allocated the bulk of its funding to the United States, d'Halluin said he intends to make Fund-Y global. In particular, he sees “a very strong push” for space startups in Europe and Japan.
