A Dallas venture capital firm has raised more than $200 million to invest in space tech.
Balerion Space Ventures announced Thursday it oversubscribed its $200 million Fund II, investing in space, defense and deep tech. Fund II has already invested in 15 companies, according to a release, including Valar Atomics, Vast Space, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Relativity Space and Erebor.
“We founded Balerion around a simple belief: The technologies that will define the future of economic and national security are being built today,” Phil Scully, one of three co-founders and general partners at Balerion, said in the release. “Investing in the infrastructure of the future is no longer a question of when, but how.”
Ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025, Balerion hosted its Nuclear Energy, Space & Defense Tech Investor Summit at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., at a time when large swaths of the tech and venture capital worlds were convening at Mar-a-Lago in hopes of making inroads with the incoming administration. Scully told Forbes at the time, “We’re entering a period of time where it’s the golden era of hardware investing,” and Mar-a-Lago “is where everyone is right now.”
Also in attendance that day was Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, attempting to scale nuclear power with modular reactors. Valar Atomics and Erebor, two Balerion investments, are prominent characters in the growing right-leaning tech scene. Valar Atomics is known for serving raw milk and leading bible study at its office, while crypto and tech-focused bank Erebor’s founder Palmer Luckey, also the billionaire founder of Anduril Technologies and Oculus, gained prominence in 2017 when he was fired from Facebook for allegedly supporting Trump’s first campaign, an allegation Facebook has denied.
In March 2026, Balerion led a $500 million funding round for Vast Space, which is looking to build “next-generation space stations” and has signed a two-mission agreement with France to send French astronauts to the International Space Station and to Haven-1, a commercial space station scheduled to launch in 2027. Past Balerion investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and former Disney Channel actress Bridgit Mendler’s space communications startup Northwood.