Satellogic offsets cash burn with US$90m sale
Satellogic moved one step closer to its goal of encircling the earth with satellites by raising an upsized US$90m from an overnight stock sale on Wednesday, and in doing so kept operations aloft.
Cantor and Titan Capital Partners were joint bookrunners on the pricing of 27.7m new shares at US$3.25, a 21.5% discount to the US$4.14 Wednesday closing share price. The banks conducted an extensive, two-day wall-cross before going public with a target to raise a US$70m fixed sum.
“We wanted to broaden out their shareholder base,” said one banker involved in the offering. “This essentially was a re-IPO, so some concession was needed to get new investors to participate. This offering was significant to get investor sponsorship for the company going forward.”
The satellite imaging company’s shares closed Thursday’s session at US$2.98, so a difficult outcome in what was a difficult tape – Planet Labs, a much larger public comp, fell 12.2% to US$13.25.
Satellogic went public in 2022 by merging with the Cantor Fitgerald-backed CF Acquisition V SPAC. That merger saw SoftBank and Cantor invest US$100m combined through a PIPE, and former US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital invest another US$150m.
Liberty held a 21.1% stake ahead of last week’s offering, Cantor Fitzgerald 14.1% and SoftBank 2.7%.
A concentrated shareholder base resulted in an illiquid stock that trades just 1.8m shares daily. As a result, Satellogic sold roughly 15 days’ trading volume and about a 20% stake on the re-IPO follow-on offering.
Satellogic, which currently operates 50 satellites with a long-term target of 200, had just US$28.3m of cash as of September 30. In the third quarter, it projects revenues of US$3.4m–$3.8m, based on preliminary unaudited results provided at launch.