Zin Technologies parent Voyager aims to raise $316M in IPO
Voyager owns 67% of Starlab, replacing ISS in 2029.
Voyager-owned Zin Technologies is Northeast Ohio's tie to Starlab.
A Denver-based space company vying to replace the International Space Station hopes to generate between $274.2 million and $316.4 million in its initial public offering, the company revealed in new IPO documents Monday.
Voyager Technologies, which filed its preliminary prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 16, said it expects to offer its shares with a midpoint price of $27.50 per share, or between $26 to $29 each. The company plans to sell 11 million shares of its stock, it said.
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When it goes public, Voyager's stock will be sold on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol VOYG.
The company is the majority owner of Starlab, a commercial space station currently meant to launch in 2029 to replace the International Space Station, which is expected to reach the end of its operational lifespan in 2028.
Zin Technologies in Middleburg Heights has long been Northeast Ohio's tie to Starlab. Voyager acquired Zin Technologies in 2023 because of its "storied history" of working with NASA for more than 50 years on projects including the International Space Station but has since laid off about 150 Zin workers.
In its most recent filings, Voyager said it would use the proceeds to invest in itself: growth initiatives, general corporate purposes, debt payments, administrative expenses, research and development programs, and pursuing mergers and acquisitions.
Voyager's founder and CEO Dylan Taylor predicted in 2021 that the company would go public.
The U.S. Government is by far Voyager's biggest customer. Depending on the quarter, anywhere from 68.7% to 88.2% of the company's funding comes from government contracts. Since its founding in 2019, it's been awarded roughly $800 million in contracts and Space Act Agreements. 25.6% of its revenue came exclusively from NASA by the end of 2024.
Last year, Voyager Technologies made $144.2 million in revenue alongside a net loss of $65.6 million.
It owns 67% of Starlab, a joint venture with Airbus, which owns 30.5%. Palantir, which designed the station's operating system, Mitsubishi and MDA Space own the rest of the joint venture.
Starlab is set to be launched by SpaceX's Starship. Unlike the ISS, which was assembled piece by piece in orbit with multiple launches, Starlab will be fully built on Earth and launched in a single rocket. This cuts down on the cost, as launches are hideously expensive, but a single launch presents its own risks, according to the prospectus.
Voyager projected Starlab to cost $2.8 billion to $3.3 billion to develop. NASA already contributed a Space Act Agreement worth $217.5 million to the project, though $70.3 million of those funds have yet to be delivered, according to the prospectus.
In 2024, the company's revenue was split roughly in half between its space and defense wings. Its biggest customers and partners are NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Airbus and the U.S. Air Force.
As of March, the company employed 514 people across 10 locations, with a significant chunk of the workforce in San Diego and Washington, D.C.
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'If you're putting out descriptions that are going to be so easily falsified, the risk is you do damage to science's reputation.' Lamm rejects the idea that Colossal's messaging undermines public credibility in science, pointing to what he says was an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Loring, who is part of an effort to use stem-cell technology in conservation, says that she sees merit in Colossal's work. It has, she says, changed her views on how to repopulate northern white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). But she worries that Colossal's messaging overshadows those contributions. 'It may create an opportunity for us to educate the public,' she says. 'More often, it creates an opportunity for us to be ignored.' To Love Dalén, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Stockholm and a scientific adviser to Colossal, the controversy is 'a storm in a teacup' that detracts from Colossal's achievement. 'It makes me a little bit sad there is this huge debate and angry voices about the common name,' he says. Dogfight Shapiro says she was surprised and saddened by the strength of reactions to Colossal's announcement. 'It was harder than I thought it would be, and the questions were getting meaner and meaner,' she says. But she and Colossal were quick to respond. 'Some of y'all are real mad about this,' she began in a video posted on X in April. 'You can call these animals proxy dire wolves or Colossal's dire wolves. All of that would be correct. We chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves and reflect the key traits we found by sequencing their genome.' A statement by Colossal to reporters in early April struck a more defensive tone. 'It's obvious most critics would rather complain than contribute,' it said. It asked critics to 'maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology'. Lamm insists that Colossal is willing to listen to scientists' criticisms. He points out that Gilbert is part of its scientific advisory board. But he also questions the legitimacy of some of Colossal's detractors. 'We have a couple of consistent critics that don't have the highest levels of credentials,' he says, 'people who haven't contributed to their fields in quite some time.' Meanwhile, one of Colossal's critics, evolutionary geneticist Vincent Lynch at the University at Buffalo in New York, has accused Lamm and the company of mounting a campaign to discredit him, after Lynch discovered several mostly anonymous web pages and posts questioning his expertise. In a series of posts on X and the social-media service Bluesky, Lynch said he suspects that Colossal and Lamm are responsible for the material. Nature has identified similar posts targeting other critics: Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, UK; palaeoecologist Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand; and Kristofer Helgen, an evolutionary biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lynch acknowledges that he has no direct evidence that Lamm or Colossal were involved. But he says he thinks that the articles targeting him and others were timed to undermine them just as the company was making major announcements, including those about the dire wolf and a gene-edited 'woolly mouse' that the company says lays the groundwork for its woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts. A Colossal spokesperson said the firm was unaware of the posts aimed at Herridge, Rawlence and Helgen, and became aware of those mentioning Lynch only when he accused Colossal of having a hand in them. The company and Lamm deny any involvement. 'It's unclear to the company who would write critical articles about Vincent Lynch, but given his obsession and aggressive behaviour, the company believes it's safe to assume he may have a few enemies,' says a spokesperson. Lynch says: 'Colossal clearly doesn't know anything about me or my life.' On 19 June, he received a letter from Colossal's lawyers, accusing him of defamation against Lamm and threatening legal action. Lynch says that holding companies and their founders accountable for their words and actions should not be considered defamation. 'It is our responsibility as scientists,' he says. Forging ahead From Colossal's perspective, the dire-wolf announcement was a success. Lamm says that the company tracked thousands of articles and social-media mentions about the achievement using artificial intelligence, and that they are overwhelmingly positive. 'I wouldn't change one thing,' he says. In July, Colossal announced controversial plans to de-extinct moas, a group of giant flightless birds that vanished not long after humans first arrived in New Zealand. And the company remains bullish on its other efforts, predicting that mammoth-like elephants could arrive as early as 2028. Some critics are becoming concerned about how the company will conduct its work in the future, and what the impacts of that might be. In a 2021 opinion piece in Nature, Herridge, who had previously turned down an invitation to serve as a scientific adviser to Colossal, wrote that she felt the company's founders were 'driven by a real desire to help the world'. But after the dire-wolf roll-out, she's concerned about Colossal's approach and its priorities. 'We have a company that is only listening to people who agree with them, who is pushing forward with statements that they aren't backing down from,' she says. This 'is not really where we want to be with a technology that has the potential to change the way our world will look'. Lamm disagrees. 'We happily engage with critics,' he says. 'As scientists, we will absolutely consider new data presented and adapt our hypotheses and conclusions.'
