The tech ecosystem isn’t just about “Uber for X” and e-commerce startups anymore: it’s about space as well, Valery Komissarov, an analyst at the Skolkovo Foundation’s space cluster, wrote in a recent blogpost for Arctic Startup.
Image: Arctic Startup / Skolkovo Foundation.
VC investments in SpaceTech are skyrocketing: 2015 funding of space-related startups more than doubled the funding for all previous years combined and reached a record-breaking $1.8 billion, according to CB Insights’ Frontier Tech report.
SpaceX and Planet Labs investor Steve Jurvetson summed up the reasoning behind this surge in an interview with Fortune last year: “Compared to other industries, I have never seen such an enormous margin for improvement. There’s this canonical thing about a startup needing to pitch a 10X improvement to be a worthwhile investment. You rarely see an entrepreneur pitch a 100X improvement. But in space we’ve seen 1,000X, and really we’ve seen 10,000X.”
And it’s worth mentioning that space startups are no longer just a bunch of aerospace engineers lacking business experience. They are ambitious companies with successful track records and world-changing plans such as providing global internet access and building reusable rockets.
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