Tokyo-Japan based private lunar lander startup, ispace, announced on 20th August 2020, that is has raised around USD 28M in series B funding.

The round was led by IF SPV 1st Investment Partnership through their Incubate Funds. It includes investment by Space Frontier (a fund whose LPs include Mizuho Bank, Toyota), Mitsui Sumitomo and Takasago Thermal Engineering Co.

The startup is planning various lunar lander missions and the acquired sum will be deployed to support its mission to the Moon in the coming years.

This latest funding brings the total funding to USD 125M which include an amount from series A funding round, valued at USD 95M. These investments will leverage ispace to develop a bigger version of its HAKUTO-R lunar lander. Reports predict that the bigger lander will be put into use for the firm’s third and subsequent Moon missions.

Apart from this, the start-up has also attracted various strategic commercial partners to support its lander franchise. Few of the partners include-
Mitsui Sumitomo, who’s developing a lunar insurance product that can underwrite future commercial Moon missions.
Takasago Thermal, who will test electrolysis tech on the Moon for future ispace missions.

The official report from ispace predicts that it will use the funding to continue to create its lander planning for 2022 and 2023 launches. The company has also launched a new data platform business, which will leverage the collected lunar data to get offered to other firms, space agencies, research organizations and others in the same domain with an informed planning basis.

These other institutions or firms could be able to utilize the data collected by ispace for further planning for Moon Missions and eventual lunar commercial and private developments.

This new lunar data business model which ispace is developing will be called “Blueprint Moon”. It predicts increasing investment in human presence on and even near to the Moon. The commercialization of space up to now has focused on Earth’s orbital environment.

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