Closing Bell - Manifest Space: True Anomaly’s $260 Millin Series C with CEO Even Rogers 5/1/25

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

True Anomaly has just raised $260 million in a Series C funding round. The company, which develops spacecraft that can maneuver each other in orbit, will use the capital to ramp up production and support future missions. Co-founder & CEO Even Rogers joins Morgan Brennan to discuss securing and defending space.

True Anomaly just raised $260 million in a Series C funding round led by Excel. The space and defense startup is less than three years old. It was co-founded by CEO Evan Rogers, who previously served as an officer in the US Air Force, focused on tactical operations and space. When we went out to raise the Series C, we really raised it as a defense round. And that is the purpose of this company. True Anomaly, I say first and raised it as a defense company. And that is the purpose of this company. Trinomaly, I say first and foremost, is a defense company. And it reflects a moment where the space domain has really

become a warfighting domain. That started in 2017. The Space Force was stood up shortly thereafter. And the Space Force is now just turning into a real warfighting service. And that means that it has capabilities to go buy and build and operators to go train. And that means that it has capabilities to go by and build and operators to go train.

And we've positioned ourselves as a defense partner to provide capabilities specifically for space superiority. True Anomaly develops spacecraft that can maneuver near other satellites in orbit. Its Jackal vehicle is designed for close proximity operations and three have been launched to low Earth orbit so far. The new capital will be used to ramp production

and support future missions to geosynchronous and even cislunar orbit. We're looking across our supply chain and thinking about where do we need to make strategic investments in order to make sure that we can not just build two spacecraft or three spacecraft, but hundreds of spacecraft. And the capital raise is an element of what allows us

to really do that. On this episode, True Anomalies' Evan Rogers on securing and defending space through hardware and software. I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now Evan Rogers, the co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly. Evan, it's so great to speak with you here at the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, it's good to see you again. Thanks. You have some news. We do. It's a big day. Okay. You're raising more funds. We are. We just closed our Series C.

So we just closed a massive fundraising round, 260 million, led by Excel. What does that enable? The Series C enables us to invest in our product, our team, and to grow our manufacturing and production footprint. We've scaled this year across four different sites, Denver, Colorado Springs, a new facility in Long Beach, and of course DC. And so we'll be investing in our product and growing the team almost twice as much this year.

Over-subscribed. What do you think that says or I guess reflects about not only the company, but also about space right now and the opportunity for investors. Yeah, I think it's a great question. When we went out to raise the Series C, we really raised it as a defense round. And that is the purpose of this company. Trinomy, I say first and foremost, is a defense company.

And it reflects a moment where the space domain has really become a warfighting domain. That started in 2017. The Space Force was stood up shortly thereafter. And the Space Force is now just turning into a real warfighting service. And that means that it has capabilities to go by and build and operators to go train. And we've positioned ourselves as a defense partner

to provide capabilities specifically for space superiority, which is the express purpose of the Space Force. I do want to get to those capabilities, but I think it's worth noting that you are an officer in the Air Force. That's right. And you're literally the person who helped craft some of the policy and some of the vision for what space as a warfighting domain would look like. It was me and a variety of other colleagues. I obviously can't take too much credit. But I think one of the things that was interesting about my career was it really overlapped

with the designation of the space domain as a war fighting domain. And because of the pace of that and the magnitude of that change, relatively junior personnel officers and enlisted personnel had the opportunity to I think have an outsized effect on the way that the service was seeing itself

and the way that we were thinking about how to evolve capabilities in the space domain. So I very proudly wore the uniform for 10 years and the way that I think about my time at Chernobyl is I just changed uniforms. I'm still focused on the mission. I'm still executing the mission. But just in the way that I think the Space Force needs right now, which is a dedicated industrial partner that is exclusively focused on building the capabilities that the Space Force needs right now, which is a dedicated industrial partner that is exclusively focused on building the capabilities that the Space Force needs at a pivotal moment in history.

So what does True Anomaly bring to the table capability-wise? Yeah, so when we set out to start True Anomaly, we really looked at what the Space Force's key strategic dilemmas and operational requirements were, and we aligned a product roadmap to meet those requirements. And so we focused on building capabilities across training, surveillance, and what's called space control or offensive and defensive capabilities. So we've started with a software stack and a hardware stack that allows us to achieve a variety of those product market fit opportunities while delivering capabilities at scale. We started with a spacecraft called the Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle.

It's designed for uncooperative rendezvous and proximity operations, which is a fancy term for bringing a spacecraft into close range with another spacecraft and delivering some sort of effect, whether that's taking a picture or something else. And that's all powered by our operating system called Mosaic, which is designed for managing forces in the space domain, battle managing those capabilities, planning them. As you may know, humans generally don't interact

with spacecraft unless you're on the International Space Station. So all of your engagement with spacecraft is mediated through software. And it's very difficult to understand what's going on around you in the space domain and to plan trajectories, right? And so you need a software platform that takes all of the complex astrodynamics and complexity

of warfare and distills that down into a set of options that operators can really understand and focus on the really specific problems of space warfare. So why is it so hard? So space is the largest warfighting domain. It's a massive volume to keep track of. There's a lot going on in space. There's new capabilities that are being deployed in space all the time.

There are no borders in space. So you have commercial activities happening quite literally in the same orbits that military activities are happening. And parsing what matters and what doesn't matter, while dealing with non-intuitive physics, the equations of motion that govern spacecraft in the domain, while also dealing with really vast distances

that drive latency. So you need highly autonomous systems, and a lot of the factors that drive success and failure in space warfighting engagements are still really being discovered. And that needs to be driven into product design, specifically into autonomy, that space systems can operate independently

of human action. There's also resource constraints, ground systems, space domain awareness capabilities. We just don't have enough sensors and links to be able to close some of these engagements and protect ourselves. So what is it about True Anomaly and the software hardware combination

that you bring to the table now that's so different and helps to crack the code on some of these issues? I think it's very simple. We've designed a team that builds a product specific for space warfighting. So we've built a team of former space operators, world-class engineers, and operators that think critically about the domain, that co-evolve the operations and tactics and doctrine of the domain with the capabilities themselves. We think critically about what needs to be built specific for space war fighting and it turns out you end up with a very different system, right?

A satellite is not a satellite is not a satellite. When you design for the mission, you design something fundamentally different. And what we've found in contemporary warfare is that software defined systems allow you to get the maximum performance envelope out of your hardware, right? And as the threat evolves, you evolve the capabilities of the system by updating the software over the air. So you can have a hardware platform, right? When you deploy something into space, you're not getting it back, at least not yet. That might change in the next few years, of course. There's a lot of companies doing interesting things there. But you still want space systems to last for a year, and in some cases up to five years, right?

But the threat is moving very quickly. And so the best way to deal with that is to evolve your tactics and therefore evolve your software. So you've already embarked on several missions with Jackal in low Earth orbit, two last year I believe. The second mission, is that still active? It's not, we closed it out.

Okay, what's next? Yeah, so what's next is we have another test flight. So Jackal, we've decided to do what many great new space companies do, which is break up the really hard problems of building products over multiple missions, right? So we've bought down the risk over the first mission, the second mission, and now we're planning the third mission.

And the spacecraft has performed very well. We're learning what we need to, and the software's performing incredibly well. We have one more test flight ahead of us, and then that's immediately followed by our flagship mission for this year called Victus Haze. Victus Haze is for the US Space Force. That's right.

It represents what I guess I'd call a bucket of missions that are new in terms of being able to test space capabilities. Is that how to think about it? The VICTUS program is a succession of missions. VICTUS-HAZE is really one of the capstone missions. Over the last couple of missions, the Space Force has learned a lot about how to get rockets ready and how to get spacecraft ready to be deployed to any orbit to deal with multiple different types of threats or reconstitution.

Victus Hays is really the first end-to-end demonstration of space superiority that the United States military has had in probably over 15 years. And we're obviously honored and very proud to be selected and trusted with that mission. Space Force, your main customer, or are you working with commercial customers as well and other defense customers? That's a great question. Space Force your main customer or are you working with commercial customers as well? Another defense customer. It's a great question. Our primary customer is the Space Force, but we do work with commercial customers.

One of the things that's really interesting about the space domain, as I said, is that the commercial operators operate in the same exact environment, right? And now they're being targeted by our adversaries. In the opening salvoes of the Ukrainian conflict, some of the first strikes were against space assets through the cyber domain, right? And I think commercial space operators are now waking up to the reality that they are in a combat zone and they have a fiduciary and an ethical responsibility

to defend themselves. But so space superiority is holistic, the space force is responsible for delivering space superiority on behalf of the nation. So our primary customer is the Space Force. But now we're starting to think about how do we protect and defend commercial operators. Now you've also focused on low Earth orbit.

Now you've announced in the last couple of months that you will also expand to geostationary orbit, cislunar orbit. What does it take to do that? And what are the opportunities there? Especially when I think about cislunar orbit. What does it take to do that, and what are the opportunities there, especially when I think about cislunar orbit, I think about Artemis program, and I think about this whole idea of building out

lunar infrastructure and this geopolitical ramification of a space race around the moon. Well, as you pointed out, the threat's going everywhere. There is no sanctuary orbit anymore, China and Russia are deploying capabilities for geosynchronous orbit, medium Earth orbit, HEO and now cislunar space. China is starting to be very active in cislunar space.

We have a responsibility to build products that can go anywhere the threat goes and anywhere the opportunity for space superiority presents itself. So in terms of what it takes, we really thought about Jackal and Mosaic as a multi-orbit capability from day one.

So we architected the system to be modular enough to be able to change out the key components that drive performance in each one of those orbits. So we thought about that from day one when we built Jackal. And now we're really just extending that performance envelope. Great. And in terms of the manufacturing and what this, just to bring it full circle here,

what this capital raise enables, how are you thinking about building up this homegrown industrial base and supply chain, especially at a time where the whole world is focused on that, given trade dynamics? Yeah, it's a great question. Most of our supply chain is US based. That's the bottom line. I mean, as a defense company, that is our primary focus, is making sure that our supply chain is protected. And so we're looking across our supply chain and thinking about where do we need

to make strategic investments in order to make sure that we can not just build two spacecraft or three spacecraft, but hundreds of spacecraft. And the capital raise is an element of what allows us to really do that. Evan Rogers, the true anomaly. It's great to speak with you today. You too Morgan, thank you.

That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.