Good morning. If you’re that friend in the group chat who never capitalizes any of your text messages…well, today’s newsletter is for you. Read on to see why.

In today’s edition…
📡 Exotrail $58M raise
🌐 $192M Maxar award
💸 The term sheet

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spacedrop it like its hot

Exotrail has raised $58M, the French space logistics provider announced this week. The startup will tap the funds to fuel:

1. The “scale-up” of its existing product suite

2. An accelerated go-to-market plan for new products

3. Abroad ops, with beachheads in the American and Asian markets

The cap table…Bpifrance, a French public investment bank, led the $58M Series B round via its SPI and Innovation Defense Funds. Bpifrance had already backed Exotrail through its F3A and Digital Venture investment vehicles (safe to say the French sovereign wealth fund has a lot of funds).

• Eurazeo, a pan-European venture fund, and CELAD, a global software engineering firm, joined the round.

• Also participating were all of Exotrail’s past investors, according to the startup. It’s a long list: 360Capital, Karista, Irdi Capital Investissement, Innovacom, iXO Private Equity, NCI-Waterstart, BNP Paribas, and Banque Populaire Val de France.

The little-s family…Founded in 2015, Exotrail has four products: spacestudio, spacedrop, spaceware, and spacetower. Yes, they’re lower case…and they’re also all trademarked.

The “scale-up”...In its Series B announcement, Exotrail refers to spaceware and spacestudio as its two “known” products.

• spacestudio is a SaaS product that offers operators mission design software.

• spaceware is a flight-proven family of flexible, high-thrust electric propulsion systems for 5–1,000kg satellites. Exotrail plans to scale production from 50+ spacewares in 2022 to 100+ in 2023 and 300+ in 2024.

The new products…Exotrail will also tap its new war chest to bring its spacedrop and spacetower products to market.

• spacedrop is a launch and on-orbit deployment service for nano, micro, and small satellites lacking their own propulsion. spacedrop will launch on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission later this year.

• spacetower refers to a software suite that will let operators fly and monitor their satellite fleets.

Finding traction: Despite the macro headwinds plaguing the private markets, Exotrail says it was able to raise its hearty round due to “outstanding commercial performance” last year.

The startup has booked steady, triple-digit revenue growth in recent years and tripled its backlog in 2022. With a product portfolio that already straddles software and hardware, Exotrail is focused on delivering its full vision of end-to-end space mobility and meeting customers where they are in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Maxar’s Imagery Will Get More Eyeballs Overseas

This morning, Maxar ($MAXR) announced that it has won a contract worth $192M over five years to supply American allies with high-res optical, SAR and 3D imagery.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) award falls under the Foreign Commercial Imagery Program. The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract will see the US and its allies tap data from four Maxar offerings:

1. SecureWatch, covering timely imagery and analytics

2. Rapid Access Program, which provides “the highest commercially available collection priority, predictable access plus virtual control of imaging operations to help meet mission requirements—all from any location on Earth.”

3. Precision 3D, which leverages Maxar imagery to create digital representations of Earth and its terrain

4. Commercial SAR, an all-weather, 24/7 radar service.

+ While we’re here: The range of Maxar’s satellite data collection and its close ties to government customers has made its imagery the first line of defense when disaster strikes around the globe.

When war broke out in Ukraine, governments and humanitarian groups leveraged Maxar imagery to characterize destruction, track Russian troop movements, and identify aid pathways.

Now, the company is applying its data coverage to aid Turkey and Syria after the major earthquakes that have killed more than 11,000 people. Yesterday, the company announced that it will activate its Open Data Program over the countries to aid rescue operations.

^SPONSORED

Payload’s Next Webinar Is Made Possible By AgileBlue

Supply chains are the weakest link for a devastating cyber attack. And the threat surface for critical suppliers and the wider supply chain is growing for all space companies.

Hackers are using innovative ML/AI techniques to penetrate advanced technology systems across the space ecosystem. Our next webinar will feature an insightful discussion on enhancing resiliency, privacy, and posture as we enter the wild-west of space. We will explore the insurance angle, and underwriters who are reconsidering cyber policies for vulnerable space companies.

In Other News…

• Planet is sharing satellite imagery of the aftermath in Turkey, and will continue to do so as more SkySat shots become available.

• Georgia’s highest court upheld residents’ vote to block the local government from building Spaceport Camden.

• ESA walked away from plans to visit Tiangong due to deepening alliances with NASA, Ars Technica reports.

• Satellites and balloons are being inflated conflated in discussions about spying in airspace and space, per Breaking Defense.

• ULA is winding down operations at its Harlingen, TX facility.

The Term Sheet

• Exotrail raked in a $58M Series B led by Bpifrance, France’s public investment bank (via Payload).

• Northrop Grumman ($NOC) priced a $2.0B debt offering, including $1B of 4.7% senior notes due 2033 and $1B of 4.95% senior notes due two decades later. The Falls Church, VA contractor also announced a $500M accelerated share repurchase agreement.

• Voyager banked $80.2M in fresh financing to continue developing Starlab, TechCrunch reports, from NewSpace Capital, Midway Venture Partners, Industrious Ventures, and Seraphim.

• Sidus Space ($SIDU) raised $5.2M from a public offering of Class A common stock.

• Resilience, a climate analytics/risk platform, nabbed a $26M Series B led by Quantum Innovation Fund.

• Virgin Orbit ($VORB) raised an additional $10M from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Investments Ltd, the air launcher told investors last week.

The View from Space

Our friends at the London Space Network (LSN) are celebrating their fourth bday tomorrow with a happy hour that starts at 6:30pm local time. If you’re local to London, sign up for the HH here, bring business cards, and tell them Payload sent ya.

LSN’s pub of choice for tomorrow’s festivities is in this picture, which, because we have to be on brand, was taken from space. A thousand brownie points to anyone who pinpoints the pub’s exact coordinates in this pic.