Apex Seeks $500 Million Round at $4 Billion Valuation

Apex, a Culver City-based space manufacturing startup, is raising $500 million at a valuation near $4 billion — double what investors pegged it at earlier this year, according to Bloomberg.

Washington Harbour, a Virginia-based investment firm, is expected to lead the round. Menlo Park's Andreessen Horowitz and San Francisco's XYZ Venture Capital will participate, Bloomberg reported.

How fast has Apex been raising?

The deal would mark Apex's sixth funding round in the four years since its founding. The company raised $400 million across back-to-back rounds in 2025, per the Los Angeles Business Journal. It closed another $200 million round in April at a valuation of roughly $2.3 billion, according to PitchBook.

That cadence runs hotter than the typical gap between startup raises. But Apex sits in a sector where capital keeps arriving. Impulse Space Inc., a Redondo Beach aerospace startup also founded in 2022, has raised five rounds to date. K2 Space Corp., a Torrance-based satellite company from the same 2022 founding class, has also closed five rounds.

The money is flowing sector-wide. California's aerospace and defense sector had raised roughly $21 billion as of the end of October — a figure that far outpaces the industry's annual capital influx over the last decade, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.

What does Apex actually build?

When Apex raised its Series C in 2025, it billed itself as the first company to manufacture satellite buses at scale. The conventional approach at the time was building each bus custom — a slower, costlier model that Apex positioned itself against.

Satellite buses are the structural platforms that carry a satellite's payload and systems. Apex's pitch is factory production: standardized platforms built in volume rather than assembled one at a time.

What is the Elveo partnership?

In September, Apex put its factory model to work with Elveo Mobile, a Washington, D.C.-based mobile connectivity company. The two companies will establish a factory dedicated entirely to manufacturing Elveo's direct-to-device satellite constellation at scale.

Ian Cinnamon, Apex's co-founder and chief executive, framed the deal as proof of the manufacturing model's speed.

"Working with Elveo is a perfect example of how Apex's model can help accelerate proliferated LEO constellation deployments," Cinnamon said in a statement. "By partnering to stand up a dedicated production facility, we're leveraging Apex's deep expertise in mass manufacturing spacecraft platforms to deploy Elveo's constellation years ahead of traditional bus supplier timelines."

Why the valuation doubled

The jump from $2.3 billion in April to roughly $4 billion reflects two forces: Apex's execution on factory-scale production and the flood of capital into California's aerospace sector this year. The $21 billion raised statewide through October already dwarfs any annual total of the past decade.

If the round closes on the reported terms, Apex will have pulled in $1.1 billion across its last three raises alone — and its backers will be betting that dedicated factories, not custom workshops, become the default way to build spacecraft platforms.