SpaceX, the aerospace company led by Elon Musk, is back on the fundraising tables. According to a recent regulatory filing, it just closed a funding round of $337mn. Raising a few hundred million has been a common thing for SpaceX in the past few years. The aerospace company seems to have a tap of unlimited funds that it opens whenever it needs some cash. Private investors are ever-willing to hand over money to SpaceX because of the fanfare surrounding it.

The valuation that came with this round wasn’t disclosed. However, SpaceX was valued at $100bn from a recent secondary sale, so the valuation from its fresh funding likely stayed around that figure. Including this round, SpaceX has raised a total of nearly $8bn from VCs. The investors that contributed to the new round weren’t disclosed.

• SpaceX is the leader in the private spaceflight sector by a large margin, beating the likes of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. In May 2020, SpaceX made history as the first private company to launch NASA astronauts into orbit. Since then, it’s completed two other crewed missions ferrying NASA astronauts to and from orbit out of six scheduled missions.

• NASA provided $3.1bn in R&D funds to SpaceX to build spacecraft to send astronauts into orbit, and the company has delivered well. That’s unlike SpaceX’s aerospace rival Boeing (NYSE: BA), which hasn’t completed a crewed flight despite taking $4.8bn in R&D funds from NASA. Additionally, SpaceX completed the first space mission with no professional astronauts but all civilians aboard this September.

• With SpaceX leading the American space race, it’s no surprise that investors are ever willing to fund the company, which has stayed private for around two decades, long past the usual timeframe for VC-backed companies to exit either via a sale or public listing. SpaceX’s investors obviously have patience and long-term trust in the company, even though they have gotten the opportunity to sell part of their stakes in secondary funding rounds.

• SpaceX’s biggest investors include Fidelity, Alphabet’s Google, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and T. Rowe Price. CEO Elon Musk has been the driving force behind the company’s enormous funding over the years, thanks to his clout as an entrepreneur and businessman. Simultaneously, he serves as CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), an electric carmaker with a market value of over $1 trillion that makes it the world’s most valuable automaker by a wide margin.

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