Voyager soars 82% on first day of trading as defense tech booms
The company plans to use initial public offering funds for research, acquisitions, and debt repayment.
Voyager's IPO highlights renewed interest in defense and space tech from investors.
Defense tech company Voyager Technologies closed its first day of trading 82% higher than its initial public offering price.
Voyager, which provides software for space and defense tech companies, priced its New York Stock Exchange debut at $31 per share on Tuesday. It offered 12.4 million shares and closed at $56.48 per share on Wednesday. Shares continued climbing after hours.
Voyager plans to use the cash injection from the offering to fund investment in research and development programs and buy assets needed for growth, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. A portion of the proceeds may also be used to pursue mergers and acquisitions in Voyager's core business areas. The rest will be used for repaying debt and the business's day-to-day needs, the company said.
Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan jointly led the offering. Early investors in Voyager include national security-focused venture firms Industrious Ventures, Marlinspike, and Scout Ventures.
Voyager's IPO is an outlier because most venture-backed companies have preferred to stay private, especially after the pandemic.
Like many tech companies that go public, Voyager is unprofitable. Founded in 2019, it's younger than peers like Palantir, which was founded in 2003 and went public in 2020, and Anduril, which was founded in 2017 and remains a private company.
Voyager also relies largely on one client: the US government. The company posted $144 million in revenue last year, out of which 80% came from US government work. NASA alone made up 25% of its sales last year. Voyager reported a loss of $66 million in 2024, over double the prior year's loss, according to a regulatory filing.
The IPO pop shows a renewed interest in defense and space tech companies from Silicon Valley and Washington alike. In an inaugural speech in January, President Donald Trump said that "We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."
Late last month at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been bullish on battlefield tech, said that America's military will be equipped with the most advanced capabilities as part of the 2026 fiscal year budget.
US military leaders have increasingly prioritized the development of AI capabilities in recent years, and want to build up America's arsenal in the technological arms race with China. They have argued that whichever country dominates this tech space will win future conflicts.
Top VCs, including Founder's Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, have been pouring into defense tech darlings like Anduril and Shield AI. In March, Shield AI raised $240 million in a funding round, boosting its valuation to $5.3 billion. Last week, Anduril closed a new funding round of $2.5 billion, a deal that more than doubled the defense startup's valuation to $30.5 billion.
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