Firefly Aerospace is taking its orbital ambitions to the general public markets. The corporate, which notched a string of successes this yr, together with a historic industrial moon touchdown, submitted its formal declaration to regulators Friday detailing its plans to IPO someday this yr.
The S-1 doc submitted to the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee supplies a wide-ranging look into the corporate’s funds and governance plans, although the variety of shares to be provided and their value vary has not been disclosed. This implies the ultimate valuation remains to be to be decided.
Firefly is heading into the preliminary public providing with $176.9 million in money and money equivalents. And whereas it has incurred unfavorable money flows and losses from operations, Firefly projected that its money is ample to satisfy its liquidity wants for at the very least 12 months.
The corporate does have a variety of debt: about $173.6 million, together with a $136.1 million time period mortgage with a 13.87% rate of interest. The online proceeds from the IPO might be utilized in half to repay that excellent mortgage, in line with the S-1.
Firefly reportedly scored $55.8 million in income as of March 31, up from simply $8.3 million for a similar interval in 2024. The vast majority of that — round $50 million — is from “spacecraft options,” or its Blue Ghost lander missions, and simply $5 million from launch. However {hardware} is an costly endeavor, and Firefly remains to be burning some huge cash: The price of gross sales, or incurred bills, was practically as a lot as income — about $53 million as of March 31, leaving simply $2.2 million in gross revenue.
The corporate operated at a web lack of $231.1 million for the 2024 fiscal yr, up from $135.5 million in 2023. Its web losses on the finish of the primary quarter have been $60.1 million.
But the corporate tells potential buyers that it sees nothing however progress forward, and there’s a handful of giant developments within the pipeline that might show that to be true. That features a serious partnership with protection large Northrop Grumman for a brand new, reusable launch automobile known as Eclipse, a launch settlement for as much as 25 launches with Lockheed Martin, and the approaching industrial debut of Elytra, a spacecraft line designed for in-space transportation providers.
The corporate additionally cited sturdy buyer demand, noting that as of March 31 it had about $1.1 billion value of backlogged launch orders and spacecraft contracts. That’s about double from the $560 million in backlogged orders it had from a yr prior. That huge enhance got here from three multi-launch agreements for Firefly’s small Alpha rocket and an extra lunar supply contract for its Blue Ghost lander.
The regulatory doc additionally states Firefly intends to be a “managed firm” — basically, that it’ll leverage Nasdaq guidelines to make sure that AE Industrial Companions, the non-public fairness agency that purchased a majority stake in Firefly in 2022, will retain important governance management over the corporate even after it’s listed on the general public markets.
The corporate intends to listing on the Nasdaq World Markets beneath the ticker image $FLY. The information comes after a relative quiet interval of area firm exits. There was a slew of area corporations that went public through mergers with particular goal acquisition corporations in 2021 and 2022, a lot of which have didn’t carry out.
Firefly’s IPO will probably present some much-needed liquidity to the market. Its IPO comes only one month after Voyager House, an area firm constructing the non-public area station Starlab, filed its IPO paperwork final month.
