Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has a theory about where the next wave of startup opportunity lies, and it starts with a question most founders aren’t asking: what if the business model was giving money back instead of extracting it?

Yang was inspired by Mark Cuban. Not by his wealth, or his celebrity, but by Cost Plus Drugs — Cuban’s startup that sells pharmaceuticals at cost. Yang made a list.

“Housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless,” Yang told TechCrunch on a recent episode of Equity. “The things we all spend money on.”

He picked wireless and last September launched Nobile Mobile, a new mobile virtual network operator that provides cell service for a fraction of what traditional carriers charge and gives customers money back if they use less data. 

As AI threatens to compress wages and displace workers, Yang sees a business opportunity in bringing down the cost of living. Cost Plus Drugs, Noble Mobile, dumb phone makers like Light Phone, and even online grocery store Misfits Markets are early examples of an emerging business category where the startup’s value proposition is the margin it gives back to the customer.

“AI is going to suck up a lot of the value and the jobs, and then Americans are going to look up and say, ‘How do I meet basic needs?’” Yang said. He believes meeting people’s needs “less expensively” is “a very rich vein of opportunity.” 

That instinct didn’t emerge from nowhere. Yang first launched himself into the public eye during his 2020 presidential campaign, during which he advocated for Universal Basic Income as a means of combating AI-related workforce displacement and wealth concentration. The campaign didn’t succeed but the thesis has only grown more relevant.

Yang is still an advocate for UBI, arguing that the value generated by AI companies needs to be redistributed into the hands of the average American. But whether the government will be the vehicle for that redistribution, or whether it will just use any collected wealth to “plug a hole and do something not terribly productive,” Yang is less certain. 

“There is room for a direct connection between the money and the people,” he said. 

That’s where the market comes in. Where policy fails, Yang argues, market incentives can step in. Noble Mobile is his attempt to prove the point. Since its launch last September, the company has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is bringing in “millions in revenue.”

“We’re unit profitable per customer, but we just share the profits with our subscribers with the idea that it’ll make you happy, you’ll stay around, and maybe you’ll tell your friends and family,” Yang said. 

The pitch is simple. Yang noted that the average monthly savings of $50, invested and compounded over 40 years, could amount to $24,000 — enough for a retirement down payment. And in this economy, who isn’t thinking about little ways they can upgrade their personal finance?

Whether investors will share that enthusiasm is another question entirely. Even if the opportunity is real, capital is concentrated heavily in AI right now, while consumer-facing businesses with thin margins and a social mission are a hard sell.

“I had at least one investor say to me around Noble Mobile, ‘Love you, Andrew, want to work with you — if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest,’” Yang said. 

The tide might be changing, though, simply because even the most wealthy, extractive companies need an economy in which consumers have enough buying power to purchase their products. 

“The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. “There are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons…[like] they just don’t want to have to hire private security.”

Yang encouraged founders and investors to take on problems they’re passionate about and find a way to build a valuable enterprise on top of it.

“Think bigger and more broadly about trying to tackle problems and don’t subscribe so much to groupthink, because there are some valuable opportunities out there,” he said.

Andrew Yang thinks the biggest startup opportunity of the next decade is not building AI. It is lowering the cost of living for the people AI is about to displace. In a TechCrunch interview, the former presidential candidate and UBI advocate laid out a thesis: as AI compresses wages and eliminates entry-level jobs, the market opportunity shifts to companies that make basic needs cheaper.

“AI is going to suck up a lot of the value and the jobs, and then Americans are going to look up and say, ‘How do I meet basic needs?‘” Yang said. He sees “a very rich vein of opportunity” in startups that bring down costs in housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless.

Yang’s proof of concept is Noble Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator he launched last September. It sells cell service at a fraction of traditional carrier prices and gives customers money back if they use less data. The company has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is generating “millions in revenue.” It is unit profitable per customer.

The model was inspired by Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which sells pharmaceuticals at cost plus a flat markup. Yang sees both companies as early examples of an emerging category where the value proposition is the margin the startup gives back, not the margin it extracts. Misfits Market (discounted groceries) and Light Phone (minimalist hardware) fit the same pattern.

“We’re unit profitable per customer, but we just share the profits with our subscribers with the idea that it’ll make you happy, you’ll stay around, and maybe you’ll tell your friends and family,” Yang said.

The challenge is capital. Investors want AI companies, not consumer-facing businesses with thin margins and social missions. “I had at least one investor say to me around Noble Mobile, ‘Love you, Andrew, want to work with you if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest,’” Yang said. The workforce displacement Yang warned about in 2020 is now showing up in data: Goldman Sachs estimated 16,000 US jobs lost to AI per month, and entry-level workers are absorbing the most damage.

Yang is still an advocate for universal basic income but is less confident the government will deliver it. “There is room for a direct connection between the money and the people,” he said. Where policy fails, market incentives can step in. A $50 monthly saving, invested and compounded over 40 years, amounts to $24,000, enough for a retirement down payment.

The thesis is contrarian in a venture market that has poured $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone. But Yang’s argument has an uncomfortable logic to it: even the most extractive companies need consumers with enough buying power to buy their products. “The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. “There are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons, like they just don’t want to have to hire private security.“

Munich-area startup ERC System has unveiled Victor, an uncrewed hybrid-electric cargo eVTOL designed for defence, logistics, and disaster response, at ILA Berlin 2026. The company says the aircraft can carry a 250kg payload over a range of 300km at a cruise speed of 250km/h. ERC System is targeting first deliveries in 2028.

Victor uses a lift-and-cruise architecture with eight lifting propellers for vertical takeoff and a pusher propeller for forward flight. A piston engine serves as a range extender on top of the electric powertrain, a design choice that ERC’s chief commercial officer Maximilian Oligschläger has said reflects the company’s reluctance to “bet on future technologies.” The hybrid approach trades the simplicity of a fully electric system for the range that battery technology alone cannot yet deliver.

The aircraft builds on flight testing of ERC’s Romeo prototype, a 2.7-tonne, 16-metre-wingspan demonstrator that the company says is the heaviest fully electric aircraft of its type to have flown in Europe. Romeo began hover testing near Munich in November 2025, completing roughly ten flights. ERC says the tests validated its flight-control system and lift-and-cruise configuration.

ERC System was founded in 2019 in Ottobrunn, just outside Munich, by Christopher Schrop, Maximilian Oligschläger, and three other co-founders. The company emerged from stealth in July 2024 and is backed by IABG, a German aerospace testing and certification specialist that serves the Bundeswehr. IABG has invested what has been described as a “significant double-digit-million-euro sum” and remains ERC’s sole institutional backer.

The company claims Victor’s direct operating costs will be roughly 70% lower than those of a small helicopter. That figure has not been independently verified, and no uncrewed eVTOL of this size has yet operated commercially in Europe, making the comparison speculative. The aircraft’s modular interior can be configured for cargo, medical supplies, or mission-specific equipment, with rear clamshell doors for loading.

Victor’s 250kg payload, 300km range, and 250km/h cruise speed are company specifications that have not been demonstrated in flight testing. The specs were disclosed at ILA Berlin and have not yet been independently confirmed. German dual-use drone makers like Quantum Systems have attracted substantial investment in recent years, but ERC’s cargo eVTOL occupies a different category, heavier and slower than military surveillance drones but designed for sustained logistical operations.

ERC is also developing Charlie, a crewed eVTOL for inter-hospital patient transfers, which it expects to enter service around 2031 in collaboration with German air rescue operator DRF Luftrettung. The company frames Victor as a near-term revenue generator while the longer and more complex certification process for a piloted aircraft plays out.

The 2028 delivery timeline is ambitious by the standards of an industry that has repeatedly missed its own deadlines. At least six European eVTOL manufacturers have entered insolvency since 2023, including Lilium and Volocopter. Defence drone startups like Berlin’s Stark have attracted billions in capital, but the transition from prototype to serial production remains the defining challenge for the sector.

ERC has no revenue, no certified aircraft, and no publicly disclosed customer contracts. It is competing for defence and logistics customers against established players with operational track records, including Dronamics, which already holds a European cargo drone licence, and military drone manufacturers with active deployments in Ukraine. What ERC does have is a flying full-scale prototype and a strategic investor with deep roots in the German defence establishment, which may matter more than venture capital in a market increasingly shaped by government procurement.

Swiss cleantech startup GR3N has raised €15.5 million in a Series B round to build the world’s first commercial-scale microwave-assisted PET recycling plant. The round was led by 360 Capital, with new investor VP Textile also participating. The proceeds will fund MODUS, a 40,000-ton-per-year facility in Spain.

PET is one of the most widely used plastics on the planet. But 98% of recycling relies on mechanical technologies that can only process transparent and light-blue bottles, roughly 15% of total PET waste. The remaining 85%, including textile fibres, films, and coloured resins, ends up in landfill or gets incinerated. It is one of the biggest gaps in the EU’s push to hit its emissions targets.

GR3N’s technology, called MADE (Microwave Assisted DEpolymerisation), can process all of it. Unlike mechanical recycling or alternatives like glycolysis and methanolysis, MADE has no feedstock limitations. It produces food-grade monomers that can be recycled repeatedly without losing performance, while cutting CO2 emissions by up to 80% compared to virgin PET production.

The MODUS plant has secured a €35 million grant agreement under the EU Innovation Fund’s large-scale industrial projects category. Intecsa Industrial, part of the Cobra IS group, is leading the engineering and construction. Financial closure is expected in Q4 2027, with commercial operations planned for Q2 2030.

GR3N was founded in 2013 by Italian inventor Maurizio Crippa, who recently handed the CEO role to Martin Stephan. Stephan brings two decades of experience in technology-driven businesses. Industrial shareholders now include Intecsa Industrial, Standex International, and Chevron.

The round is modest by venture standards, but the EU grant and industrial backing signal that the technology is past the lab stage. If MODUS delivers on its 40,000-ton annual capacity, it would demonstrate that chemical recycling can work at scale for the types of PET waste the industry has struggled to handle. Europe has twice as many climate tech startups as the US, but scaling deep tech from lab to factory remains the hard part.

Founders, your window to enter Startup Battlefield 200 closes in just three short days.

Applications for Startup Battlefield 200 officially close on June 8, 11:59 p.m. PT. Do not wait any longer. Secure your shot at competing on the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this October at San Francisco’s Moscone West.

Thousands of startups have already stepped forward. If you’re building a company with the potential to reshape an industry, now is the time to make your move.

Apply or nominate a startup before the deadline.

What is Startup Battlefield 200?

Startup Battlefield 200 is where ambitious early-stage startups go from unknown to impossible to ignore. Selected founders will take the spotlight at Disrupt, pitching live in front of top investors, influential media, and the global startup ecosystem.

One startup will take home $100,000 in equity-free funding, but every selected company gains exposure that can accelerate growth, attract customers, and open doors to future fundraising opportunities.

Over the years, Startup Battlefield alumni have collectively raised more than $32 billion and achieved more than 250 exits. Alumni have gone on to be acquired by companies such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon.

The competition has also helped launch companies such as Dropbox, Discord, Mint, Fitbit, and Trello.

Why founders are racing to apply

In a competitive fundraising market, standing out has never been more important. Startup Battlefield 200 offers founders a rare opportunity to put their companies directly in front of investors, media, customers, and potential partners.

Selected startups receive:

• A free exhibit table for all three days of Disrupt.

• Four complimentary Disrupt passes.

• Branding and visibility inside the Disrupt event app.

• Press exposure and lead-generation opportunities.

• Access to founder-only masterclasses.

• The opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage.

• Direct feedback from leading venture capitalists.

• A chance to win $100,000 in equity-free funding.

Who should apply?

TechCrunch is looking for bold early-stage startups with a working MVP and a vision capable of disrupting an industry.

Bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed-stage startups are encouraged to apply. Select Series A startups in capital-intensive sectors may also qualify.

If you’re building a category-defining company, this is your opportunity to prove it on one of the biggest stages in tech.

Three days left. One opportunity.

The application window closes June 8, and every application is reviewed by the TechCrunch team.

With only three days remaining, this is your chance to put your startup in front of investors, media, customers, and future partners all in one place.

Apply or nominate a startup before the deadline, and earn your place among the next generation of Startup Battlefield competitors.

After a very profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.

Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors and served on the model maker’s board until he stepped down in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board when the tech giant entered into one of those non-acquisition, acqui-hire deals for $650 million with his AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through that deal.

Hoffman said on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, while talking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that he’s ready to go “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manus. Manus is a drug discovery company that raised over $50 million through a couple of seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.

Hoffman is cited as a co-founder of Manus and chairman of the board, not the CEO, though. That job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”

Still, Hoffman said he’s excited to give Manus more attention.

“One of the things I realized over the last month was that, we’re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,” he said. He believes the startup is making progress on “Move 37” AI, meaning AI that supersedes human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various cancers, he added.

Audiobook, ebook, or both? Now, you won’t have to choose. The Scribd-owned reading subscription service Everand wants to make the choice unnecessary. On Tuesday, the company took the wraps off a combined subscription that brings together Everand’s catalog of over 1.5 million audiobooks and ebooks with the social book club app Fable, which Everand acquired in 2025, into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading.

The new subscription is available to two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to that over 1.5 million title library of audiobooks and ebooks, plus Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book clubs. As you read or listen in one app, that activity is synced to the other.

The entry-level plan offers one book for $11.99 per month in the U.S., while a $16.99 per month plan offers three books, and a $28.99 per month plan lets you dive into five. Because the subscription covers both ebooks and audiobooks, that’s a fairly competitive deal compared with Audible Premium Plus ($14.95/month), which offers one credit for an audiobook along with its streaming catalog of originals and podcasts.

The hope on Everand’s part is that this bundled approach could help smaller players like itself make a dent in Amazon’s reading empire, which today spans Audible audiobooks, Kindle ebooks, and the still-popular reading recommendation and logging app Goodreads.

It’s a textbook case of using an acquisition to create switching costs and deepen user engagement — exactly the playbook Amazon has run for years. By combining the properties, Fable’s more than 100 million ratings and reviews can now be surfaced in Everand, while Everand readers can jump into communities associated with the book they’re currently reading.

The company notes that last year, 820,000 Fable readers joined a new club in its app. With the new subscription plans, Fable Plus is included, offering advanced reading stats, custom reading goals, and an ad-free experience.

Everand isn’t the only one circling Amazon’s turf. Spotify has also entered this market with its own audiobooks offering and, oddly, physical books. To help users move between formats, Spotify offers a “page match” feature that syncs your place between a physical book and the audio version.

Everand believes the new combined experience could attract readers who want a subscription that covers both audiobooks and ebooks in one place, citing its own survey of over 1,600 U.S.-based adult readers conducted in 2025, which found that over half of readers regularly consume both formats.

Timing matters here, too. Thanks to BookTok’s influence and a general resurgence of offline (or “analog“) activities, particularly among Gen Z, readers today are interested in not just consuming content but forming communities around the content, where they can discuss their latest reads, rate and review titles, share favorite quotes and passages, and more.

Fable’s community app caters to this trend, offering a book tracker, reading goals, daily streak trackers, lists, book clubs, and discussion rooms.

The app is not without its competition. Today, there are numerous reading companion apps to choose from, including Hardcover, Storygraph, Margins, PageBound, Bookshelf, Bookly, TBR, Reading Journey, and Bookwise, and many others. The crowding has already claimed one casualty; Tome announced a shutdown earlier this month, citing overwhelming competition.

In addition to the combined subscription for U.S. readers, Everand is also expanding its Standard, Plus, and Deluxe subscription tiers to worldwide markets. It has also modified how “unlocks” work, allowing unused credits to roll over for up to six months, instead of expiring at the end of a subscriber’s billing period.

Board, the three-year-old, New York-based startup building what it calls “together tech” — tech designed to bring people physically into the same room — has closed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures.

General Partner Michael Mignano, in his first investment since joining USV, will join the company’s board of directors. The round also brought in some famous angel investors including Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Belsky.

The raise comes about eight months after founder Brynn Putnam — who previously sold connected fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million — unveiled Board publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt last October.

The Board device is a 24-inch touchscreen in a wood-finish frame that uses proprietary technology to recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.

Traction since launch has been strong, the company says: Board is now in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants across all 50 states, with 85% of customers averaging 30 or more play sessions per month.

Alongside the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform launching later this year that will let anyone build original games using natural language prompts — from idea to playable prototype in under an hour, it says.

Board had previously raised $15 million in funding led by the venture firm Lerer Hippeau, which had also led Mirror’s $3 million seed round years earlier. That was a bet that paid off handsomely when Putnam sold the connected fitness company to Lululemon in 2020.

Putnam sees Board as a natural extension of what she learned about consumer hardware while building Mirror. “Mirror was very much about me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better. At that next phase, my life was really just much more about my family and my friends and my relationships.”

The result is a product built around the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of tech might be to get people to put their devices down and look each other in the face.

The raise arrives at a moment when consumer tech, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of bouncing back, driven in large part by what AI is making newly possible.

“I’m more excited about consumer than I’ve been in a long time,” said Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, late last year during a separate sit-down with TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a very high-quality group of founders saying, ‘Now’s the time to get back in the pool.’ There are things that are possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is steep.”

Impulse Space, a startup founded by SpaceX engine guru Tom Mueller to build highly-maneuverable spacecraft, announced a $500 million Series D this week that it will use to hire as many as 200 new employees.

The round, led by 137 Ventures and BANNER VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Linse Capital, reflects investor interest in space and defense tech as the U.S. government hurls cash at national security problems and SpaceX gears up for its IPO.

Impulse is focused on in-space mobility. The company has developed a highly maneuverable platform called Mira that is targeted at U.S. Space Force buyers. It’s also building Helios, a vehicle designed to carry satellites rapidly to high orbits after they are dropped off in space closer to Earth.

President and COO Eric Romo told TechCrunch that the new capital will help the company build and test more space vehicles and emphasized the company’s hiring plans at a time when aerospace talent is in high demand.

While the company’s software teams are adopting AI coding tools, Romo said that when it comes to solving engineering problems in the real world, deep learning models aren’t quite ready for prime time. As the 13th employee at SpaceX back in 2003, Romo’s job was creating computer simulations of the company’s engine design to assess its performance.

“I considered it success if I got within 20% of the right answer, because the simulations were just not that good,” Romo said. “They’ve improved, but they’ve not improved that much, and so there’s not really any substitute for designing the thing, analyzing the thing, building it, and then getting it on the test stand.”

Romo suspects AI tools for hardware design may be slower to arrive because the right training data is hard to find, compared to the amount of text and code available on the internet to train LLMs. “If you want to go, say, find the best designs for a turbo pump seal package in the world, you’re not going to find those online,” he points out.

Impulse started with a focus on propulsion and evolved to build spacecraft, requiring the company to add more expertise in the form of engineers who build vehicle structures and flight computers. One reason the company recently opened an office in Colorado is that aerospace talent has more options today — instead of just going to Los Angeles, engineers can find work in Seattle, Denver, or Texas.

Next up for the company is another launch of its Mira spacecraft, which made its third flight late last year. That flight wasn’t without incident — a problem with its navigation system led it to expend much of its propellant early on. Romo said the company is prepping a new Mira mission that is expected to launch before the end of the year.

As SpaceX counts down to what could be the largest IPO in history, the race to build the next generation of launch vehicles is heating up. Asia wants in. Startups across Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea are racing to establish themselves in a market long dominated by the U.S. and China.

One of them is Unastella, a four-year-old South Korean startup that just closed a $24 million Series B, bringing its total funding to $44 million. The company launched its own rocket, the UNA EXPRESS-I, from South Korean soil in May 2025.

The Seoul-based rocket startup is developing its own launch vehicles and engines, with an initial focus on small satellite launch services. Unastella’s near-term focus is validating its technology and business model through orbital launches, with crewed suborbital spaceflight as a longer-term goal, founder and CEO Jae Park told TechCrunch.

Unastella uses a kerosene and liquid oxygen propulsion system, one of the most proven combinations in rocket history, and one that is also used by SpaceX’s Falcon series. On top of that, the company swapped out the traditional turbo pump for an electric motor pump, a simpler and cheaper alternative that Rocket Lab has already validated in flight.

The tradeoff is payload. Electric motor pumps are heavier, which means less room for satellites. But Park said that’s a deliberate decision.

“We’re not an R&D group trying to build the most impressive rocket,” Park said. “We’re a commercial launch company trying to get to market fast.”

Park also notes that Unastella handles everything in-house, such as design, manufacturing, ground operations, and flight data. The UNA EXPRESS-I launch last year was the first real-world test of the entire system end-to-end, Park said.

The CEO has spent his entire career working on rocket engines. Before founding Unastella, Park worked on combustion systems for Korea’s Nuri rocket — the country’s first indigenously developed orbital launch vehicle, built by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). He then moved to the German Aerospace Center in Berlin to work on European launch vehicle engines, and returned to Korea to join another rocket startup before deciding to build his own.

Unastella isn’t generating revenue yet, but investors appear to be backing the startup’s roadmap. Altos Ventures led the Series B, joined by Korea Development Bank, Strong Ventures, and Hana Ventures, among others.

UNA EXPRESS-II, targeted for next year, is the launch Park is really building toward. Reaching 100 kilometers would mark a significant milestone, one he believes will open the door to partnerships with South Korea’s major aerospace and defense firms.

The 22-person startup has already laid the foundation and developed institutional relationships. Korea’s national space agency has flown components on UNA EXPRESS-I, and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute has transferred electric motor pump technology to the company.

Unastella is not alone in the race to tap into the global space launch market, which was worth roughly $15 billion in 2023. By 2030, it is projected to nearly triple to $41 billion, according to Grand View Research.

South Korea’s commercial launch sector is still in its early stages, but the field is already taking shape.

Hanwha Aerospace, the country’s largest defense conglomerate, took over the government-built Nuri rocket last year after acquiring full technology rights from KARI. Two startups are also competing: Innospace, which went public on the Korean stock exchange and has conducted a sub-orbital launch, and Perigee Aerospace, which is developing its Blue Whale rocket. None have yet achieved a commercial orbital launch. South Korea’s space agency KASA, established in 2024, has committed $266 million over seven years to build out launch infrastructure — a sign that the government is betting on the private sector to take the lead.

The competition extends well beyond Korea. In Asia, China leads the pack: Galactic Energy, LandSpace, and iSpace have all conducted multiple launches. Japan’s H3 rocket, developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi, completed its first successful launch in 2024, while startup Interstellar Technologies is building its own small vehicle. In Australia, Gilmour Space attempted its first orbital launch this year. And then there is Rocket Lab — founded in New Zealand, now listed on Nasdaq — which remains the only Asian-founded company to have built a commercially viable launch business.

This story has been updated to reflect that UNA EXPRESS-II is targeted for launch next year, not later this year as originally reported.