For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media.
Relativity promised to disrupt launch by taking a somewhat niche technology in the space industry at the time, 3D printing, and using it as the foundation for manufacturing rockets. The pitch worked. Relativity's chief executive Tim Ellis liked to brag that his first investor call was to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who cut the company's first check. Cuban invested half a million dollars.
That was just the beginning of the torrent of fundraising by Ellis, who, by November 2023, turned the privately held Relativity into a $4.5 billion company following its latest, Series F funding. This was an impressive start for the company founded by Ellis and Jordan Noone, both engineers, in 2016.