Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for his experiences at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup to compete with SpaceX.
“It’s very simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch, having met Weil in 2020 after he co-founded Stoke and joined Y Combinator’s. winter batch. “I dropped out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to raise money. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin[was an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth through their fund] Scribble Ventures) comes with all these backgrounds and was able to help me think about raising money and getting the company off the ground.
As the two continued to talk, Lapsa raised $1.34 billion, incl $510 million Series D A round of funding in 2025 – the creation of a fast reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now it’s time for Weil to join the board as a director to continue scaling the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and he did not respond to TechCrunch’s inquiries.
Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms that are not clearly on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the leader of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research. to leave the company after the work of this program became more widespread in the frontier laboratory in April. He previously served as Chief Product Officer of OpenAI from June 2024 to October 2025.
Weil’s latest work raises an obvious question: was OpenAI’s Sam Altman reported last year, Stoke kicked the tires and considered investing in its SpaceX competitor. Could there be a connection between the Weil AI lab and a possible partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumours” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stock itself.
Stoke is developing a Nova rocket that is completely reusable and can be flown again and again. No one has ever done it before, and SpaceX comes closest with the massive Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket, particularly its ability to withstand the extreme heat of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space, have deterred even the deepest-pocketed space investors. Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, flirted with this approach but did not opt for it.
And now, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut is riding on much of its value Elon Musk’s promises The fact that the starship will fly on operational missions this year – proved Lapsa’s foresight. Despite the many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there aren’t enough rockets to go around, and the next company to come up with an affordable rocket promises to kill regularly.
“The world understands that the issue is still not resolved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of complete, rapid reuse was there a little bit at the time … it’s become quite normalized now, and people now see that it’s inevitable.”
Note that the idea of building distributed data centers in space to harness solar energy and avoid political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The main obstacle here is the cost of putting all these computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with full-speed reuse,” Lapsa said, adding that they could be a key differentiator for Stoke when the rocket takes off.
Military contracts will also be key to the company’s success, and Weil has experience bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense; was one four process conveyors and shakers which joins the US Army Reserve to improve recruitment and collaboration between the military and industry. And this is not his first time in the space business. Weil served as president of Planet Labs, an earth observation satellite company, for three years after it went public in 2021.
Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy, the company needs to execute, even if it’s close to delivering the operating system.
“We have a large part of the risk behind us, we have more to go,” said Lapsa. “We’ll work as hard as we can and we’ll go when we’re ready.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
