Outlier Space

Outlier Space is designing a capsule that goes up with a customer's equipment inside, stays in orbit while it makes something, and brings the result home. The company describes itself as the landlord of a very particular factory. The customer supplies the machinery, Outlier supplies the absence of gravity and the ride back, and the vehicle is refurbished for the next tenant. The target customers are drug makers, materials researchers and government programmes, and the first flight is planned for 2028.

Jamie France founded the company in Auckland after Rocket Lab, where he was a vehicle design engineer on Electron, then production director and global director of the Electron programme, with earlier stints at Altitude Aerospace and Emirates Team New Zealand. A $7.35 million pre-seed round led by GD1, with Nova Threshold, Brian Cartmell, Airtree, Icehouse Ventures, Investible and Side Stage Ventures, closed in July 2026, which the company calls one of the largest pre-seed raises in New Zealand.

There is no vehicle yet, and no published mass or payload figure. What exists is a founding team with Electron heritage, a pre-seed round and a memorandum with Yuri, a German microgravity biotech contractor, to bring its customers' research aboard.