Apex, a spacecraft mass manufacturing company based in Los Angeles, has raised $16m in its Series A funding round. The funding was led by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to over $27m. Apex will use the additional funding to open a new 50,000 sq ft production facility in Los Angeles dedicated to serial bus manufacturing. This investment and the new factory will allow the company to expand its production rate and further reduce lead times for its customers. Apex builds productised satellite buses, starting with their flagship Aries platform, a 100kg bus capable of supporting up to 100kg of payload mass. Apex buses are manufactured at scale and can be configured with different performance packages, enabling Apex customers to leverage the benefits of serial production for varied mission needs. Apex also announced the list of customers flying on its first Aries satellite bus, set to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 10 in Q1 2024. The satellite will host missions for three customers. Orbit Fab, Ubotica, and a Tier-1 Defense Contractor are all flying as payloads on Apex’s first mission, named “Call to Adventure”. All three payloads will inhabit the same satellite bus, running a set of missions that include proximity operations, edge computation, and communications.
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