Technology
Loft Orbital forms joint venture with UAE-based company to boost satellite production in the Middle East
A holding company linked to the Emirati royal family is investing in a brand new joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based Marlan Space and a startup Orbital Loft with over $100 million to expand domestic satellite manufacturing capabilities in the region.
A joint venture called Orbitworkswill likely be the first business company in the UAE to mass-produce satellites. The majority shareholder is Marlan Space, a brand new space company affiliated with International Holding Company. IHC is majority-controlled by Royal Group, a conglomerate owned by Abu Dhabi’s ruling royal family.
The UAE has big space ambitions—and deep pockets to fund them. The UAE Space Agency (UAESA) has been around for lower than a decade, but the government has spent billions investing in domestic capabilities and forging partnerships with other countries and business entities. The UAE sent its first astronaut (or privately funded “spaceflight participant,” as NASA calls it) to the ISS in 2019; two years later, it became the latest in a really small group of nations to put a probe in orbit around Mars.
The Gulf nation’s space ecosystem has several key players beyond UAE: Space42, a merger of Emirati satellite company Yahsat and data analytics firm Bayanat; EDGE Group, a serious industrialist; and a handful of universities and research institutions, similar to the National Space and Science Technology Center. The country is at some extent where it wants to deploy satellite constellations and produce satellite manufacturing capabilities domestically.
Loft Orbital CEO Pierre-Damien Vaujour said in a recent interview that he has long been interested in the UAE’s space ecosystem: “Even when we founded Loft, I always thought that I wanted to start a business in the UAE and contribute to the development of the ecosystem there.”
San Francisco-based Loft buys satellite buses in bulk and carries payloads for patrons using a typical modular payload adapter that integrates customer equipment with the spacecraft. Loft handles all launch integration and services the spacecraft once it reaches orbit. The startup may perform “virtual missions,” where customers can deploy applications in orbit that use onboard sensors, computers and cameras.
Vaujour said Loft’s flexible hardware will enable the joint venture to work with a wide selection of latest players in the Middle East’s space ecosystem. “Loft can work with any payload provider, any trunk or subsystem provider, any ground station provider, any cloud provider… We provide the joint venture with a playbook for satellite manufacturing, operations and technology,” he said.
Orbitworks intends to produce up to fifty 500-kilogram satellites per 12 months, with equipment for the first ten satellites already purchased. It will operate from a 50,000-square-foot facility in Abu Dhabi, with the first satellite platform to be assembled, integrated, and tested there by early 2025.
Vaujour said the startup has entered into agreements with Marlan to ensure Loft complies with U.S. export regulations and licenses. A separate Loft entity, Loft Federal, will proceed to provide work for classified contracts for U.S. national security clients.
“This entity that was created has a mandate to become the national champion in the country in terms of manufacturing and operating satellite constellations, and this is something that is quite new,” Vaujour said. “Although we are starting small, the idea is to scale it up. The ambitions, both nationally, regionally and internationally, for something like this are quite big.”
Technology
Waymo’s latest round of financing raises its valuation to $45 billion
Waymo recently Closed a $5.6 billion Series C financing round led by parent company Alphabet, joined by a who’s who of Silicon Valley enterprise capital firms. The investment brings Waymo’s overall valuation to over $45 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
Alphabet previously announced in July that it could donate one other $5 billion to Waymo, but didn’t provide details, saying only that it was a “multi-year” commitment. Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Perry Creek and T. Rowe Price joined the round. Waymo declined to say how much each had invested.
This is Waymo’s second round of external fundraising and first since its $2.25 billion Series B in 2020, which eventually grew to $3.2 billion. The autonomous vehicle maker says it is going to use the funds to expand into latest cities and further develop its autonomous capabilities for “business applications.”
Waymo is a totally different company now in some respects than when it raised within the last round. At that point, the corporate was still pushing towards autonomous trucking, which it had abandoned.
Instead, the corporate focused almost entirely on robot transport services. The bet paid off. Waymo currently provides industrial robotaxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and is expanding to Austin and Atlanta. It provides paid rides to greater than 100,000 customers every week in its first three markets and offers rides to and from the Phoenix airport. Operates on highways within the Phoenix and San Francisco areas.
Technology
India Posts Notice to Wikipedia Over Bias Concerns
Wikipedia is facing increasing regulatory pressure in India as local authorities query whether the platform should proceed to enjoy legal protection as a neutral intermediary reasonably than being classified as a publisher.
India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice to Wikipedia on Tuesday questioning the indirect status of the encyclopedia offered to technology platforms in India. The ministry cited concerns about concentrated editorial control and chronic complaints about bias and inaccuracies on the platform.
The notice follows a controversial case before the Delhi High Court, where judges described Wikipedia’s open editing feature as “dangerous” and threatened to suspend its operations in India. The court is hearing a defamation case filed by news agency Asian News International that seeks to discover Wikipedia authors who allegedly characterised the news agency as a “propaganda tool” of the Indian government.
Justice Navin Chawla rejected Wikipedia’s request for added time to respond due to Wikipedia’s lack of physical presence in India, warning of contempt proceedings against the platform if it fails to comply with the order to disclose user information. “If you don’t want to comply with Indian laws, don’t do business in India,” the judge said.
Wikipedia maintains that its volunteer editors must follow established rules on verifiable content and legal guidelines, though this defense is facing increasing scrutiny from Indian authorities concerned concerning the platform’s content moderation practices.
Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama and a outstanding voice on technology policy, questioned the legal basis for the federal government’s move, arguing that Indian IT law determines a platform’s status based on features reasonably than the variety of editors.
“You can be a platform with one user/editor or a billion,” he wrote on X.
Technology
Coatue raises $1 billion for AI betting
Coatue Management, a hedge fund that has invested heavily in tech startups throughout the pandemic boom, is raising $1 billion to support artificial intelligence corporations, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
The funds that can contribute to the corporate’s flagship fund will probably be obtained primarily from institutional investors. However, the report shows that wealthy individuals with accounts at brokerage Raymond James and Associates can even spend money on Coatue.
Coatue, which manages nearly $50 billion in assets, invested in greater than 170 VC-backed corporations in 2021, based on PitchBook data. Since then, Coatue has dramatically slowed its pace of investing in startups, supporting only 81 corporations in 2022 and around 30 corporations in 2023.
However, the cross-border investor shouldn’t be done investing in private corporations. According to PitchBook data, in 2024 Coatue supported 29 startups. The company’s latest AI-focused investments include Glean, Scale AI and Skild AI, which is constructing a general-purpose AI robot. Philippe Laffont, founding father of Coatue (pictured above), said they’re particularly enthusiastic about humanoid robots with artificial intelligence-powered brains.
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