Key highlights from the report include:
With another $5.7B invested into 80 space companies in Q4, there has now been $177.7B of equity investment into 1,343 unique companies in the space economy over the past 10 years, with $25.6B invested in 2020.
Despite wide expectations of investor pullback in H1, VCs invested another $15.7B into 252 space companies in 2020, of which $9.4B went to U.S. companies, representing 6% of the $156.2B in total venture dollars invested during the year, according to data from Pitchbook and NVCA.
While many expected Infrastructure to be the hardest hit by the pandemic, 2020 turned out to be a record year for investment in this layer of the stack with $8.9B invested.
The trend towards larger, late-stage deals set a new record with $19.8B invested in Late Stage/Other rounds in 2020. Overall, investment in the top 10 companies account for $16.5B (or 64%) of total space investment in the year. While the total number of rounds was down, early-stage rounds remained healthy, accounting for 211 rounds (or 59%) of all rounds completed in the year
Investors liquidated $37.5B of value in 43 space company exits in 2020, accounting for 16% of the total value liquidated in the space economy over the last 10 years.