Italian space and services company D-Orbit on Thursday announced plans to go public through a SPAC, in a deal that values the company at $1.4 billion.
The merger with SPV Breeze Holdings is expected to close in the second or third quarter of the year and D-Orbit will be listed on the Nasdaq Composite under the ticker symbol DOBT.
“We have made tremendous strides in the development and testing of our unique ION technology and have built a dedicated customer base to whom we have been providing last mile satellite delivery and advanced infrastructure services for more than eight years,” said Luca Rossettini, CEO of D-Orbit in a statement.
D-Orbit and Breeze also announced a partnership with the Bolden Group, founded by former NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, which the companies say will “help fuel D-Orbit’s next phase of growth.”
The transaction is expected to add up to $185 million in cash to D-Orbit’s balance sheet – approximately $88 million through debt, a $5.5 million PIPE (private investment in public equity). dollars and nearly $117 million of dependent SPAC redemptions.
D-Orbit is the latest space company to turn to a SPAC to go public, with the number of all-space stocks doubling in the past year on a flurry of deals. But the changing market environment, with rising interest rates hitting tech and growth stocks hard, has seen the market value of several space stocks halved since their inception.
The Italian company employs more than 160 people. Last year, D-Orbit generated $3.4 million in revenue and forecasts that number will grow to about $22 million by 2022. It projects to be profitable on an Ebitda basis by 2024, with annual revenue of approximately $445 million.
D-Orbit has built a mission backlog of US$21.5 million with an additional US$167 million in contracts under negotiation.
D-Orbit’s key product is the ION satellite launcher, which it touts as a “flexible, cost-effective” solution for launching satellites into specific orbits.
The practice of “riding” satellites during launches, where a rocket carries from a handful to dozens of additional satellites as secondary payloads, is becoming more popular. But that means the secondary satellites are often far from their intended target, resulting in months of course corrections required to reach the correct orbit.
D-Orbit has completed four ION missions since September 2020, with two more planned in the first half of this year. Of the more than 70 payloads that D-Orbit has delivered into space, the company says its customers have experienced “up to 85% time reduction from launch to turnover.”
The company’s current production facility has the capacity to build 15 ION vehicles per year.
It also uses its ION spacecraft for additional services, such as B. In-orbit demonstrations and cloud computing infrastructure. In October, D-Orbit completed its first test of its space cloud infrastructure, which the company said was “designed to provide distributed high-performance data analytics computing and storage capabilities.”
