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Quarterly release · Q3 2026

SpaceNexus Most Active Space Investors

Which investors led the most disclosed space funding rounds in the quarter, and over the trailing twelve months.

Data as of 2026-09-30 · computed 2026-10-07 · current edition

← Q2 2026 All editions

Space rounds counted: 48
Disclosed capital: $3.30B
Rounds naming a lead: 38 of 48
Distinct lead investors: 60

Lead investors, Q3 2026

Investors ranked by the number of rounds they are recorded as leading inside the quarter.

Lead investors, Q3 2026. Investors ranked by the number of rounds they are recorded as leading inside the quarter. Showing the first 10 of 60 rows.
#	Investor	Rounds led	Disclosed total	Median round	Sectors backed	Companies
1	Mitsubishi Electric	2	$146.2M	$73.1M	analytics; launch	Array Labs; PLD Space
2	ICONIQ	1	$500.0M	$500.0M	manufacturing	K2 Space
3	Kleiner Perkins	1	$500.0M	$500.0M	manufacturing

Lead investors, trailing twelve months

The same ranking over the four quarters ending with this one: the stabler table, and the one to cite for "most active".

Lead investors, trailing twelve months. The same ranking over the four quarters ending with this one: the stabler table, and the one to cite for "most active". Showing the first 10 of 183 rows.
#	Investor	Rounds led	Disclosed total	Median round	Sectors backed
1	Washington Harbour Partners	4	$129.5M	$18.0M	analytics; ground-segment; infrastructure
2	Riot Ventures	3	$909.0M	$205.0M	defense; manufacturing
3	Lux Capital	3	$445.0M	$104.0M	manufacturing; satellite
4

Investor participation, Q3 2026

Investors ranked by rounds they appear in at all, lead or otherwise. A different question from the lead table, and a weaker denominator.

Investor participation, Q3 2026. Investors ranked by rounds they appear in at all, lead or otherwise. A different question from the lead table, and a weaker denominator. Showing the first 10 of 147 rows.
#	Investor	Rounds	Disclosed round value	Sectors
1	Airtree	2	$32.4M	analytics; in-space-manufacturing
2	L&S Venture Capital	2	$26.6M	components
3	Wuxi Venture Capital	2	$0	infrastructure; launch
4	Altimeter	1	$500.0M	manufacturing

Leads new to the table

Investors who led a round this quarter and led none in the previous 4 quarters of our records.

Leads new to the table. Investors who led a round this quarter and led none in the previous 4 quarters of our records. Showing the first 10 of 52 rows.
Investor	Rounds led	Disclosed total	Companies
ICONIQ	1	$500.0M	K2 Space
Kleiner Perkins	1	$500.0M	K2 Space
Atomico	1	$450.0M	The Exploration Company
Bessemer Venture Partners	1	$450.0M	The Exploration Company
Scaleup Europe Fund	1	$450.0M	The Exploration Company
Paradigm; Caffeinated Capital	1

Rounds behind these tables

Every round the rule counts, largest disclosed first, with its source. This is the row set the tables above are computed from. What the rule left out is in the next table, not missing.

Rounds behind these tables. Every round the rule counts, largest disclosed first, with its source. This is the row set the tables above are computed from. What the rule left out is in the next table, not missing. Showing the first 10 of 48 rows.
Date	Company	Sector	Stage	Amount	Lead	Source
2026-07-30	K2 Space	manufacturing	Series D	$500.0M	Kleiner Perkins; ICONIQ	GovCon Wire
2026-09-08	The Exploration Company	infrastructure	Series C	$450.0M	Bessemer Venture Partners; Atomico; Scaleup Europe Fund	European Spaceflight
2026-07-27	Antares Industries	infrastructure	Series C	$370.0M	Paradigm; Caffeinated Capital

Transactions the rule excludes

Every transaction recorded against a tracked company in the quarter that does NOT reach the capital figure, with the reason. Published so the headline can be checked rather than trusted.

Transactions the rule excludes. Every transaction recorded against a tracked company in the quarter that does NOT reach the capital figure, with the reason. Published so the headline can be checked rather than trusted. 8 rows.
Date	Company	Stage	Amount	Instrument	Why it is excluded
2026-08-06	Hadrian	Series D	$1.37B	venture	The company's recorded sector is "defense" and its subsector "advanced-manufacturing", and neither names space work.
2026-08-17	SpaceSail (Yuanxin Satellite)	Capital increase	$1.04B	state	Capital from governments or state-owned funds, not private funding.
2026-08-19	Castelion	Series C	$800.0M	venture	The company's recorded sector is "defense" with no recorded subsector, and neither names space work.

Investor strings this edition rewrote

Our sources record a jointly-led round as one free-text string. Every string this edition split or renamed is listed here with what it became, over the whole trailing-twelve-month window, so a wrong split is visible rather than buried in an aggregate.

Investor strings this edition rewrote. Our sources record a jointly-led round as one free-text string. Every string this edition split or renamed is listed here with what it became, over the whole trailing-twelve-month window, so a wrong split is visible rather than buried in an aggregate. Showing the first 10 of 169 rows.
As recorded	Read as	Rule applied	Rows
a16z	Andreessen Horowitz	renamed	2
B Capital	B Capital Group	renamed	2
Lightspeed	Lightspeed Venture Partners	renamed	2
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation	Mitsubishi Electric	renamed	2
Wuxi Venture Capital (锡创投)	Wuxi Venture Capital	renamed

Methodology

Every figure is a count or a sum over the FundingRound table joined to the company profile. No estimate, model or projection is used anywhere in this release.
Only PRIVATE SPACE ROUNDS are counted. A transaction must be primary private capital into the company: IPOs, direct listings, SPAC mergers, PIPEs and registered directs are public-market offerings; tender offers and secondaries move shares that already exist; debt is borrowing and grants are not investment. It must also go to a company our records classify as doing space work, which for cross-domain sectors such as defence and aerospace requires the recorded subsector to name space. Every excluded transaction is published in the edition with the reason. The full rule travels in each edition’s coverage block.
A round is attributed to the quarter its announced date falls in, in UTC.
A round counts toward an investor only when that investor is recorded as the LEAD. Participation without a lead credit is ranked in a separate table, because we do not hold complete participant lists and a partial one would rank the wrong firms.

What this edition can and cannot see

Coverage limits travel with the numbers, here and in every export of them.

WHAT THE CAPITAL FIGURE COUNTS. A round reaches the disclosed-capital total only if it passes two tests, and both are read from fields the row already carries.
FIRST, THE INSTRUMENT. It must be primary private capital going into the company: a priced equity round, a convertible note, a bridge or an extension. Excluded are IPOs, direct listings, SPAC mergers, PIPEs, registered directs and other public-market offerings; tender offers, secondaries and share sales, which move shares that already exist and put no new money into the company; debt, which is borrowing rather than investment; owner funding, an owner putting their own money into the company, which no outside investor priced; state capital, a round whose money comes wholly or mostly from governments or state-owned funds, which is not private funding; and grants, which are non-dilutive public money. The test is the round’s own recorded type and stage. One case needs the company too: a private placement into a listed company is a PIPE and is excluded, while the same label on a private company is an ordinary private round and counts. More generally, a raise by a listed company is a public-market deal unless the row names a private stage (Seed, Series A and so on), which only exists before listing. A company counts as listed from its first trading day on a stock exchange, or the close of its SPAC merger: a round dated before that day is the company’s private history and is classed like any private company’s round. Where we have not yet recorded a listed company’s listing date, its current listing status decides and the row is marked as such.

Sources and licences

The same credits are written into every CSV and JSON export of this data, so a downloaded file still names its sources.

UK Companies House: Company registration data from the UK Companies House register. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Open Government Licence v3.0

Cite this edition

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Citation

SpaceNexus Most Active Space Investors, Q3 2026. SpaceNexus, data as of 2026-09-30. https://spacenexus.us/releases/most-active-investors/2026-Q3. https://spacenexus.us/releases/most-active-investors/2026-Q3 (retrieved 2026-10-07).

Free to cite and embed with attribution. Data updates continuously; the citation date pins your retrieval.

By SpaceNexus Data

Computed from SpaceNexus data - no model is involved in producing a release

Every figure here is arithmetic over our own rows (counts, sums, deltas and rankings), and the page and its export are built by the same code, so they cannot disagree. How this edition is computed

Computed over the 38 of 48 counted space rounds in the quarter that name a lead investor. A jointly-led round credits every co-lead with one round led, so the disclosed-total column sums to more than the quarter’s capital: it is a per-investor figure, not a share of the market.

Showing the first 10 of 60 rows. 50 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

The complete row set and its CSV and JSON exports are part of a SpaceNexus Research seat. The figures above are computed from exactly the same rows, so the summary and the export can never disagree. What a Research seat covers.

Computed over the 140 of 187 counted space rounds in the trailing twelve months that name a lead investor (232 transactions were recorded in the window before the rule was applied). Co-leads are credited individually.

Showing the first 10 of 183 rows. 173 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

Only 31 of 48 counted space rounds in the quarter carry an investor list. Disclosed round value is the size of the rounds an investor appears in, NOT the amount that investor put in: we do not hold per-investor allocations and will not infer them.

Showing the first 10 of 147 rows. 137 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

Absence from the lookback window means we recorded no lead credit for that investor, not that the firm was inactive.

Showing the first 10 of 52 rows. 42 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

A blank amount means the round is real and its size was never disclosed. Nothing downstream infers one. The Lead column is the recorded string split into its co-leads; the string exactly as stored travels in the export as leadInvestorAsRecorded.

Showing the first 10 of 48 rows. 38 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

8 of 56 recorded transactions, $4.03B in disclosed value. Nothing here has been deleted or altered in the database: these rows are excluded from ONE figure, and they are printed so the exclusion is checkable.

Split only on a slash with whitespace on both sides. Ampersands and commas are deliberately left alone, because "Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace", "Mitsui & Co." and "ESA European Launcher Challenge (Germany, UK)" are single names, so a co-lead pair joined by an ampersand is under-credited rather than wrongly split. Strings that passed through unchanged are not listed.

Showing the first 10 of 169 rows. 159 more in this table, plus every column the display leaves out.

Jointly-led rounds are split. Our sources record co-leads as one string ("Eclipse / Riot Ventures"); we split on a slash with whitespace on both sides and on nothing else, because an ampersand or a comma can sit inside a real firm name, and credit each co-lead with one round led. Each edition publishes every string it split or renamed.

Rounds with an undisclosed amount are counted in the round count and contribute $0 to totals. Totals are therefore a floor, never an estimate.

Ranking is by rounds led, descending; ties break on disclosed total, then on investor name (A–Z), so the table is reproducible.

"New to the table" means the investor led no counted round in the previous four quarters. It is a statement about our records, not about the firm.

SECOND, THE RECIPIENT. The company’s own recorded sector must describe space work. Sectors such as defense, defence, aerospace, government and military span more than one domain, so for those, and only those, we additionally require the recorded subsector to name space, orbit, satellite, launch, lunar or spacecraft work. A company with no recorded sector is excluded. Marketing tags are deliberately not consulted: several defence companies tag themselves “defense-space” while building no space hardware.

This makes the figure a conservative floor. A genuine space round misfiled under a cross-domain sector will be missing from it, and that is the direction we choose to be wrong in. Every excluded round is published in the exclusions table on this page with the rule that excluded it: nothing is deleted to make the number look better.

APPLIED TO THIS QUARTER. 56 transactions are recorded against tracked companies, 48 of them pass the rule and 8 do not. The 8 excluded carry $4.03B of disclosed value, and every one of them is printed in the exclusions table above with the reason it was refused.

Of the 48 counted rounds, 30 disclosed an amount. Totals are a floor, not an estimate.

38 of 48 counted rounds name a lead investor (79.2%). Every lead ranking on this page is computed over that subset only.

31 of 48 counted rounds carry a wider investor list. The participation table is computed over that subset, and it is the weaker of the two attributions.

HOW CO-LED ROUNDS ARE READ. Our sources record a jointly-led round as one free-text string, such as "Eclipse / Riot Ventures". We split those on a slash with whitespace on both sides, and on nothing else, because an ampersand or a comma can sit inside a real firm name; each co-lead is then credited with one round led. A short list of variant spellings that both appear in our own data is merged to one name. Every string that was split or renamed is listed in the normalisation table above. One consequence to keep in mind: a round led by two firms appears in full under both, so the disclosed-total column of a ranking sums to more than the quarter did.

Our round coverage is built from regulatory filings, company announcements and cited press coverage. It is not a census of the market, and an investor absent from a table may simply be absent from our records for that quarter.

Sector is taken from the company profile as it stands today, so a company that changed sector is reported under its current one in every quarter. The space test above is therefore applied using the classification as it stands today.

Every figure on this page is a count, a sum, a median or a ratio over our own rows. Nothing is model-generated, estimated or projected.

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