Rocket fuel: Seattle-area startups raise a record $3.5B as national VC funding cools

What happened

That’s more than triple the $1 billion raised in the region in the same quarter a year earlier, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor . It’s also more than $1 billion above the previous quarterly high of about $2.4 billion, reached in late 2018 and again in late 2022.

Three space companies in the region raised $1.6 billion combined: Stoke, Redmond-based Starcloud and Seattle’s Hubble Network . Big rounds for Stoke Space, Temporal and Helion pushed Seattle-area venture funding to $3.5 billion in the third quarter, the most in at least a decade, even as U.S.

funding fell 40% from the prior quarter. Most of the money went to a handful of companies building physical things: rockets, satellites, spacecraft and fusion power plants.