Google’s GV bets $30M on a stock exchange for space

The space industry can build rockets. Moving money around them is the hard part. A new startup called Nebex wants to fix that, and Google’s venture arm is backing it with $30mn.

GV, formerly Google Ventures, led the seed round, Bloomberg reported. Nebex also opened a banking relationship with JP Morgan. The company is the latest bet that space is becoming a real market, not just an engineering feat.

What Nebex is building

Nebex calls itself the market infrastructure for the space economy. In plain terms, it is an exchange. It aims to connect three groups: space firms selling technology, foreign governments wanting to buy or build space capabilities, and investors willing to finance the deals.

The platform would match those parties and take a fee on any deal that closes, the company said in its announcement. It is chasing big contracts, targeting deals of around $100mn or more.

The problem it wants to solve is friction. Selling space technology across borders moves slowly, tangled by export rules, tariffs and national-security checks. Nebex says it will not change the compliance burden. It just wants to make the deals large and smooth enough to be worth the effort.

Why now

Timing is the pitch. For decades the space business ran as a closed loop. A few big contractors built hardware for a few government contracts. Builders even ran the International Space Station partly on barter, trading hardware for crew time.

That is changing fast. Cheaper, more frequent launches have widened access to orbit, and a wave of startups now builds satellites and services. The recent public listing of SpaceX has also pulled fresh money toward the sector.

Founder Tejpaul Bhatia says investors and space agencies want in. He frames Nebex as the missing financial layer for an industry that has lacked one. Cross-border payments, he told Bloomberg, are the core knot the company is trying to untie.

Who is behind it

Bhatia is the former chief executive of Axiom Space, where he helped run private astronaut missions to the space station. He has worked on more than $1bn of commercial space deals, and earlier held roles at Google and Citigroup.

His co-founders bring matching backgrounds. Anand Subramanian built the ad-exchange startups ContextWeb and NimbleTV. Manlio Di Stefano is a former Italian deputy foreign minister, useful for the diplomacy that space deals require.

GV led the round, with Eniac Ventures, 2048 Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures among the backers. “Tejpaul is a rare founder who actually knows how to move fast in a heavy, high-friction industry like space,” GV general partner Erik Nordlander said.

Why it matters

Nebex is a bet on plumbing, not rockets. If the space industry is really becoming a market, it will need the same financial rails every other industry has. Exchanges, clearing, standard contracts and clean cross-border payments are unglamorous but essential.

The risks are real. Nebex has not launched yet, and brokering deals between governments and defence-adjacent firms is legally heavy work. Bhatia has not even put his own money in yet. A preliminary version of the site is due later this summer, with a full launch planned by the end of the year. Only then will it become clear whether the space economy wants a stock exchange of its own.