EXIM approved a $468 million direct credit facility for Astranis on September 30, its first direct loan of this kind to support expansion of domestic spacecraft production and assembly infrastructure. The debt financing provides direct capital rather than a commercial debt guarantee, funding scaled manufacturing of Astranis’s proprietary MicroGEO satellites, small geostationary communications spacecraft that provide dedicated point-to-point bandwidth as an alternative to large traditional GEO trunking satellites, from its 153,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco. J.P. Morgan’s Securitized Products Group served as sole arranger and structuring agent, and EXIM coordinated with NASA’s Office of Strategic Space Finance to align public and private capital across domestic space supply chains.
The loan follows a $450 million equity and debt raise Astranis completed in May 2026. With five MicroGEO satellites currently deployed in geostationary orbit, the company is servicing a backlog of more than $1.2 billion in commercial contracts. Customers include Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, Gulf Space Technology in Thailand, MB Group in Oman, stc group in Saudi Arabia and the US government, and Astranis serves as prime contractor on the US Space Force’s Resilient GPS program. The company has raised over $1.2 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton and Snowpoint, and employs about 500 people.
EXIM Chairman John Jovanovic called the facility “the beginning” of the agency’s push to keep the US ahead in the industries of the future, while CEO John Gedmark said the backing provides “the capital to ramp up production at home, deliver connectivity to customers around the world, and expand our work securing our country’s most valuable assets in GEO.” The deal lands as countries increasingly seek sovereign, dedicated connectivity infrastructure as an alternative to traditional commercial satellite providers.