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 document submitted to the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee supplies a wide-ranging look into the corporate’s funds and governance plans, although the variety of shares to be provided and their worth 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 detrimental money flows and losses from operations, Firefly projected that its money is ample to satisfy its liquidity wants for a minimum of 12 months.
The corporate does have a number 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 can be utilized in half to repay that excellent mortgage, based on 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. Nearly all 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 almost 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 had been $60.1 million.
But the corporate tells potential buyers that it sees nothing however development forward, and there’s a handful of giant developments within the pipeline that might show that to be true. That features a main partnership with protection large Northrop Grumman for a brand new, reusable launch automobile referred to 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 companies.
The corporate additionally cited robust buyer demand, noting that as of March 31 it had about $1.1 billion price 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 large increase got here from three multi-launch agreements for Firefly’s small Alpha rocket and a further lunar supply contract for its Blue Ghost lander.
The regulatory doc additionally states Firefly intends to be a “managed firm” — primarily, that it’s going to leverage Nasdaq guidelines to make sure that AE Industrial Companions, the personal fairness agency that purchased a majority stake in Firefly in 2022, will retain vital governance management over the corporate even after it’s listed on the general public markets.
The corporate intends to record on the Nasdaq World Markets below the ticker image $FLY. The information comes after a relative quiet interval of area firm exits. There was a slew of area firms that went public through mergers with particular objective acquisition firms in 2021 and 2022, a lot of which have did not carry out.
Firefly’s IPO will doubtless present some much-needed liquidity to the market. Its IPO comes only one month after Voyager Area, an area firm constructing the personal area station Starlab, filed its IPO paperwork final month.