Bezos finally "opens the door to welcome guests": Blue Origin launches its first round of external financing with a valuation of $130 billion following SpaceX's listing.

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin LLC is seeking to bring in outside investors for its first round of external financing since its establishment. According to sources, Blue Origin plans to raise $10 billion in this financing round, with a pre-money valuation of $130 billion. Well-known asset management firm Coatue Management is expected to lead this financing round, committing $4 billion, while Bezos himself will also contribute an additional $2 billion. Both Blue Origin and Coatue have not commented on the news. Blue Origin is seeking outside funding at a time when the enthusiasm for space investments is being fueled by its competitor SpaceX's record-breaking IPO. SpaceX went public last month, with a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion and raised about $86 billion, setting a new record for the largest IPO in the world. Following SpaceX's IPO, capital markets have significantly increased their valuation expectations for private aerospace companies. Blue Origin, founded in September 2000, is about 18 months older than SpaceX, but has mainly relied on funds from Bezos' sale of Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) stock. Despite holding multi-billion dollar government contracts from NASA's "Artemis" moon landing program and the U.S. Space Force's national security launches, Blue Origin still lags behind SpaceX in terms of launch frequency and revenue scale. Unlike SpaceX, which has the strong revenue engine of its Starlink satellite internet service, Blue Origin's business focus remains on launch services, rocket engines, and government space projects. Currently, Blue Origin is facing a delicate adjustment period. Its heavy-lift launch vehicle "New Glenn" completed its first successful launch in January 2025 but suffered an explosion during a static fire test in May, leading to a temporary grounding of that model. The company expects to resume flights later this year. In addition, in January of this year, Blue Origin halted flights of the suborbital tourism rocket "New Shepard" in order to focus on developing a lunar lander and other moon technologies for NASA. While seeking external financial support, Blue Origin is also accelerating its diversification. The company previously announced a low-orbit communication network plan called TeraWave, with plans to deploy over 5,400 satellites for its first launch next year. Additionally, the company is also involved in the "Project Sunrise," aiming to deploy a constellation network of up to 51,600 satellites for space-based data centers, directly competing with SpaceX's similar plan. However, analysts point out that deploying AI computing on a large scale in orbit still faces significant challenges, with limited scale in the short term, and substantial commercial viability is not expected until the next decade.