Firefly Aerospace is poised for public markets liftoff after raising an upsized US$868.5m late Wednesday from its Nasdaq IPO, providing the space explorer money to offset steep losses and potentially bridging operations to profitability.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Jefferies and Wells Fargo priced an upsized 19.3m shares at US$45.00, above an upwardly revised US$41–$43 marketing range and an increase from the 16.2m shares marketed. The banks increased the marketing range earlier this week from the US$35–$39 launch talk.
Even after the upsize, the offering was 20x oversubscribed, allowing for allocations to be skewed toward long-only investors. The top 25 institutions received two-thirds of the shares sold and management achieved a 90% hit rate from one-on-one meetings, bankers involved in the offering told IFR.
Firefly is set to debut Thursday on Nasdaq under the ticker “FLY”.
The offering, which values the company at an enterprise value of US$6.5bn, comes five months after Firefly successfully landed its Blue Ghost module on the moon. A return mission is scheduled for early 2026.
In addition to the lunar module, Firefly is developing a higher-power reusable rocket, called Eclipse, that it hopes to test next year, as well as communications and monitoring satellites that would support the US Golden Dome missile defense project and other initiatives.
Since the beginning of 2024, Firefly has doubled its backlog to US$1.1bn as of March 31.
In the trailing 12 months ended March 31, the company bled through US$192m of adjusted Ebitda despite growing revenue by 42% to US$103m, dragged down by US$159.9m spent on research and development.