WASHINGTON - Lunar Outpost, a Colorado-based company that builds lunar rovers, has raised $30 million in an oversubscribed Series B round led by Industrious Ventures, with participation from Type One Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Promus Ventures, Reliable Equity, and others. The funding comes as the company scrambles to redesign its rover to meet NASA's newly revised Artemis architecture.
“Lunar Outpost is moving beyond early missions to scaled, repeatable deployment,” said Taylor Sargent, partner at Industrious Ventures, in a statement that sounds like it was generated by a press-release-writing AI. The round closed in less than five weeks, a pace that founder and CEO Justin Cyrus noted is significantly faster than the four to six months required for earlier rounds. “This fundraising round came together in less than five weeks,” he said, presumably while not sleeping.
Lunar Outpost is best known for its Eagle rover, which it developed for NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program. But at NASA’s Ignition event on March 24, the agency pivoted to focus on a lunar base and told Lunar Outpost and two other competitors - Astrolab and Intuitive Machines - to scrap their fancy designs and propose simpler rovers that could be ready by 2028. “NASA, at the Ignition event, basically said you have to have a rover ready to go at the end of 2027,” Cyrus said. “So, we said, ‘Understood. We’re going to do everything in our power to make that happen.’”
The company had been talking to investors before Ignition but kicked off the round immediately after. “Once Ignition happened, we kicked off the round in response to it, and the response was fantastic,” Cyrus said. He credited the “beautiful photos coming back from Artemis 2” with getting investors excited, because nothing says “sound investment” like a few shiny pictures of the moon.
The new rover design, called Pegasus, uses 72% of the elements from Eagle - sensors, avionics, tires - and borrows from the Apollo-era lunar rover and the company’s smaller MAPP robotic rover. The company has built a “human-in-the-loop” mockup tested by former NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld and submitted its proposal to NASA, with a response expected later this month. “It’s safe, reliable human mobility that can livestream back to Earth, that can provide the scouting, the site selection, do a little bit of surface site preparation,” Cyrus said, describing a rover that is essentially a luxury SUV for the moon.
The funding will help Lunar Outpost procure long-lead items for Pegasus, expand facilities, and support other robotics work for NASA and the Pentagon. “This fundraise positions us well to go meet the rapidly expanding market,” Cyrus said. As for the Eagle rover, it’s not dead - just postponed to “phase two” of the lunar base plan. “It’s not dead. It just got moved to phase two,” Cyrus said, which is corporate speak for “we’ll get to it when the moon base is actually built.”