Space infrastructure company Loft Orbital has raised $170 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Tikehau Capital and Axial Partners. Notably, the Series C round exceeds the total $160 million the company has raised since its founding in 2017.

Loft Orbital declined to disclose its valuation. According to PitchBook data, its last funding round in 2021 (a $130 million Series B round) had a post-money valuation of $550 million.

Bpifrance, Foundation Capital, Temasek and Uncork Capital also participated, bringing the company's lifetime funding total to $330 million.

Loft also declined to disclose hard revenue figures, but co-founder and COO Alex Greenberg told TechCrunch that the company's revenue has grown 100% for two consecutive years.

"We have achieved over $500 million in bookings after raising just $160 million in pre-Series C funding. In an industry known for its capital intensity, we pride ourselves on our capital efficiency," he added . “Our real focus at the moment is profitability and making the business sustainable."

The company has sold more than 30 satellites to customers including NASA, Microsoft, Anduril and BAE Systems. The five satellites launched to date have deployed on a total of more than 25 customer missions, the company said.

When it was founded in January 2017, the company's self-proclaimed mission was to "make it easier for organizations to deploy and operate space missions." In short, Loft aims to handle the process of deploying and operating customer missions as a service.

It buys standard satellites from suppliers such as Airbus and LeoStella and equips them with payloads from customers, saving them the trouble of buying, operating and managing their own hardware and ground segment networks.

"Unlike other companies in the industry, we are not designing satellites for a specific mission - we are configuring existing components of the satellite platform," Greenberg said. “Think of it like Legos.”

It also offers "virtual missions" that allow customers to deploy their software applications onto Loft satellites to leverage onboard sensors and compute nodes, analyze collected data and run a range of use cases.

The Loft has been busy lately. The startup announced a joint venture with Abu Dhabi's Marlan Space last August, raising more than $100 million from a holding company affiliated with the UAE royal family to boost domestic satellite manufacturing capabilities in the region.

It also said it had launched YAM-6, a satellite designed to run artificial intelligence in space.

Greenberg said Loft will use the new funding in two ways. It plans to expand from launching a few satellites per year to more than ten per year. It also hopes to expand its virtual missions and expand its artificial intelligence business, where customers can create artificial intelligence systems (such as wildfire detection) in their own clouds and deploy them to Loft satellites. He hopes to develop an ecosystem of partners for AI applications.