WASHINGTON — Astroscale, the satellite servicing and debris removal company, will go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in June.
Astroscale announced May 1 that it had filed to go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, a portion of the exchange for companies with higher growth potential but also higher risk. Shares will start trading on June 5.
The company plans to offer 20.8 million shares in the initial public offering, but has not announced a share price. According to filings with the exchange, Astroscale will set that price May 27.
Astroscale has raised more than $375 million through a series of private rounds, most recently a $76 million Series G round in February 2023. That funding has primarily come from Japanese investors, including a strategic investment by Mitsubishi Electric in that Series G round.
Tokyo-based Astroscale, with offices in France, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States, is developing several technologies to service spacecraft and to remove orbital debris. That includes the ongoing Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) mission to inspect the upper stage of a Japanese H-2A rocket left in orbit as a precursor for deorbiting it.
According to its exchange filings, Astroscale, which operates on a fiscal year from May to April, reported 1.79 billion yen ($11.3 million) in revenue in the fiscal year ending in April 2023, nearly double the 910 million yen in the year ending April 2022. The company reported a net loss of 9.26 billion yen in the year ending in April 2023, versus a net loss of 5.48 billion yen a year earlier.
Astroscale will be the third Japanese space company to go public in a little more than a year. Lunar lander developer ispace went public in April 2023, shortly before its first mission crashed attempting to land on the moon. The Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, or iQPS, went public in December 2023 to support its efforts to deploy a constellation of synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites.
Astroscale separately announced April 25 that the Japanese space agency JAXA selected the company for the second phase of its Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration (CRD2) program. Under that second phase, Astroscale will develop and launch a mission to go to the same upper stage being inspected by ADRAS-J, but this time grapple the stage and remove it from orbit.
“Having demonstrated several key capabilities during the ongoing Phase 1 mission, we are eager to demonstrate our ability to address the next challenge: the removal and deorbiting of large debris,” said Eddie Kato, president and managing director of Astroscale Japan, in a statement. “This next phase holds significance in addressing the space debris issue and laying the foundation for a sustainable environment for future generations.”
The announcement did not include a schedule for launching the second mission. An Astroscale spokesperson said the company could not disclose the value of the CRD2 phase 2 award.
The ADRAS-J mission, which entered a proximity operations phase with the upper stage last month, is continuing. The company released April 26 an image of the stage taken by ADRAS-J as it moved to within several hundred meters of it. Astroscale said in April that the ADRAS-J mission will be completed by the end of May.
