Today
@SpaceX becomes a public company, the largest IPO in history.
Even though we were lucky to invest back in 2017, the moment that sticks with me isn't on any cap table.
June 2025. Cape Canaveral. I watched the Falcon 9 liftoff in the middle of the night (video below- sound on please!!), carrying precious payload (four human astronauts) to the International Space Station, including Shubhanshu Shukla, the first Indian astronaut on the ISS and second Indian astronaut ever. As a kid of Indian immigrants, watching that rocket climb hit different.
That mission, Ax4, was managed by Axiom Space, whose CEO at the time was
@tejpaul.
We've known Tej for almost 20 years, since he was a 3x startup founder, before Google, before Axiom. Watching someone you've known that long end up leading human spaceflight missions is surreal. And now he's founded Nebex, the fintech platform for the global space economy: the commercial rails that let governments, companies, and capital actually transact in space. We're lucky to have been the first investor to commit, before the company was even formed.
And that's the real story of this IPO. Not the valuation. Not the ticker.
It's that SpaceX didn't just build rockets. It unlocked an entirely new economy. Cheap, reliable launch means thousands of founders can now build businesses in orbit that were science fiction a decade ago: manufacturing, communications, earth observation, space stations, and the financial infrastructure underneath it all.
Congrats to the entire SpaceX team and to all the epic founders building in this incredible space (pun intended)! 🚀🚀🚀