Australian, South Korean Investors Pour More Cash Into SpaceX At $125 Billion Price Tag

The $250 million extension to SpaceX’s last funding was led by a group of previously unidentified investors from Australia and South Korea, sources tell Forbes.

As tech companies struggle to justify sky-high private market valuations, SpaceX remains a rocket ship, quadrupling in value over the last three years. And with a new extension to its most recent funding round, it’s added more global investors to its supporter mix.

South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments and Australia’s Queensland Investment Corporation led a $250 million cash injection into SpaceX as an extension of its most recent funding round, a source with knowledge of the transaction tell Forbes. The new round, which maintained SpaceX’s pre-money valuation at $125 billion — the highest for any U.S. startup — means SpaceX now carries an effective valuation of $127 billion. Its fundraising haul for the year now stands at $2 billion.

SpaceX reported the funding extension in an August 5 regulatory filing that confirmed the investment sum and listed five unidentified investors. That sum, without any investor names, was first reported on Friday by CNBC. SpaceX and the investors could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday. Mirae’s involvement was confirmed by an additional source.

QIC and Mirae Asset were the most significant contributors to the round, which came about due to excess demand for shares of SpaceX, the source says; but they were not the only ones. Alpha Dhabi and International Holding Company, two Abu Dhabi-based investment groups, each contributed $25 million to the round. Those firms confirmed their investments in June via filings, as first reported by The National and were included in a reference to the funding round on startup data tracker PitchBook.

Mirae Asset is a surprise name to see investing in SpaceX, though the firm purports to have more than $2.5 billion in venture capital-style alternative assets under management, per its website, including grocery delivery app Jokr, Indian ride sharing platform Ola and southeast Asian super-app Grab. But just days before SpaceX’s filing about the new investment, the company was busy launching South Korea’s first lunar mission, orbiter Danuri, on August 5. (Meanwhile, a SpaceX team was heading to QIC’s home country of Australia — not to launch a rocket, but to investigate possible spacecraft debris that crashed on a farm.)

The additional investment by such international firms shows demand for SpaceX shares remains high, despite a macro environment in which other high-valued tech companies have marked down their valuations and Musk’s recent high-profile, and now disputed, attempt to acquire social media platform Twitter. SpaceX has now raised at least $9 billion in total funding to date, according to startup data tracker PitchBook. In June, it reported in a filing that it had raised an initial $1.7 billion at the widely-reported $125 billion valuation independently confirmed by Forbes.

One reason SpaceX’s valuation has proven more resilient than other unicorns: high demand, not just for its shares, but for seats on its rockets. Earlier this week, a company director said at an industry conference that SpaceX had nearly fully booked its rocket payloads through 2024 and was already accepting bookings in 2025.

That — and the promise of more international business aided by its new allies — could help soften the sting of a recent domestic setback. On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission denied the company’s application to receive $888.5 million in funding for its Starlink satellite broadband internet service, a reversal of a previous 2020 decision, despite noting the technology “shows real promise.”