Which US rocket companies achieved the most during 2025?

Once again, Ars Technica is here to provide some answers in the form of our annual power ranking of US launch companies. We began doing this in 2022 and have since put out a top-10 list every year (see 2023 and 2024). Our intent, as always, is to spark debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful rocket company. It's a demanding business, both technically and financially. We respect the grit and hustle because we know just how hard this stuff is.

Please also note that this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in the decision. And finally, our focus remains on what each company accomplished in 2025, not on what they might do in the future.

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— Nintex CEO Amit Mathradas announced that he’s leaving to take the helm of Five9 beginning on Feb. 2. Mathradas has led Nintex, a Bellevue, Wash.-based workflow automation company, for nearly three years. His previous roles include chief operating officer at Avalara, general manager at PayPal, and a 14-year run at Dell.

Five9 is a California-based software company specializing in AI-powered customer experience solutions.

“It is an honor to join such a dynamic company that I have long admired as being at the cutting edge of AI-driven CX,” Mathradas said on LinkedIn.

— Starting Jan. 1, Zoë Stemm-Calderon will take the role of executive director at the Raikes Foundation, where she has worked for a decade. She is transitioning from her current position as senior director of Youth Serving Systems.

During her tenure, Stemm-Calderon has managed yearly investments of $20 million directed toward initiatives focused on K-12 and higher education, along with youth homelessness programs.

Jeff and Tricia Raikes are the co-founders of the foundation, which launched in 2002. Jeff Raikes was at Microsoft for close to three decades and served as CEO of the Gates Foundation for more than five years. Tricia Raikes is co-founder of Giving Compass.

— Emily Heffter is now senior director of thought leadership and research for Workday, a finance and HR software company with offices in Seattle. Heffter joins the company from Qualtrics, where she was vice president of global communications. She was previously Zillow Group’s director of corporate communications.

“I’m joining Workday’s amazing communications team to help tell one of the most dynamic stories in the business world: the future of work.” Heffter said on LinkedIn. That includes “how people, technology, and leadership are evolving together — and helping business leaders see around the corner.”

— Seattle’s Lance Ludman has joined SurveyMonkey as its new chief financial officer. Ludman was most recently CFO at the social impact company Benevity. He also served as CFO at DreamBox Learning, a Bellevue, Wash.-based edtech company that was acquired in 2023.

SurveyMonkey CEO Eric Johnson praised Ludman’s “unique leadership style,” adding in a statement that “he maintains a persistent curiosity and business-partnership mindset.”

— Yatharth Gupta has joined Google’s Kirkland, Wash., office to work on cloud storage as director of product management.

Gupta is the founder and former CEO of Codified, a startup that aimed to help companies get a better handle on how to manage internal data access standards. Codified launched in 2023 after incubating at Madrona Venture Labs. Gupta told GeekWire that the company is winding down.

He was also a general manager at Microsoft for more than 14 years, where he helped lead Azure-related data access and management projects. More recently Gupta was a senior vice president of product management at enterprise database company SingleStore.

— Seattle-area rocket company Stoke Space appointed Matt White to its board of directors. White is executive vice president and CFO for Linde and serves on the board as a representative for Industrious Ventures.

— Laurent Boinot, Microsoft’s head of power and utilities in the Americas, has joined the board of LF Energy, an open-source foundation supporting energy deployment.

— Vivek Ladsariya, general partner and managing director at Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, joined the board of Seattle startup Tin Can, makers of a Wi-Fi-enabled landline-style phone for kids.

— Washington Research Foundation named Joe Albe as the new manager of grants and venture research at the organization, which helps universities and other nonprofits in the state commercialize and license their technologies. Albe recently earned his doctorate degree in immunology from the University of Washington.

The foundation also announced its 2026 postdoctoral fellows:

• Stefany Cruz, a software engineer working at the UW on agentic Al technologies.
• Winston Dredge, who joins the UW to research the impact of genetic variation on early human development.
• Nastacia Goodwin, a neuroscientist who will study the impacts of climate change on bee behavior at the UW.
• Kunal Lodaya, a chemist coming to the UW to work on high-capacity redox flow batteries.
• Allyson Martin, an entomologist joining WSU to study pollinators in orchard settings.
• Jongbeom Park, a molecular biologist studying the effect of developmental and environmental variations on mammalian newborns at the UW.
• Zoe Rand, who joins the UW and NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center to study harmful algal bloom detection and management.
• Nathaniel Ritz, a neuroscientist joining the Institute for Systems Biology to investigate host-microbe communication.
• Jonas Wilhelm, a biochemist coming to the UW’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) to create catalysts for greenhouse-gas removal.
• Marcus Wong, who joins the UW to study immune responses to malaria and other infectious diseases.
• Chuanyun Xu, a biologist joining the IPD to design proteins for cellular sensing and control.
• Lu Yu, a biochemist using DNA nanotechnology to advance targeted cancer therapy at the UW.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is thinking about expanding into the final frontier for data centers, and his efforts to follow through on that thought reportedly turned into talks with Stoke Space, a rocket startup headquartered just south of Seattle.

Altman looked into putting together the funding to invest in Stoke Space, with an eye toward either forging a partnership or ending up with a controlling stake in the company, according to an account published by The Wall Street Journal. The discussions reportedly began this summer and picked up in the fall, but are said to be no longer active.

Such a move would open up a new front in Altman’s competition with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has talked about scaling up Starlink V3 satellites to serve as data centers for AI applications. “SpaceX will be doing this,” Musk wrote in a post to his X social-media platform.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the Blue Origin space venture, has voiced a similar interest in orbital data centers — as has Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google is partnering with Planet Labs on a space-based data processing effort known as Project Suncatcher.

The tech world’s appetite for data processing and storage is being driven by the rapidly growing resource requirements of artificial intelligence applications. Altman addressed the subject on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast in July.

“I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” Altman said. “But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, ‘Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.'”

Citing unidentified sources, the Journal said Altman has been exploring the idea of investing in space ventures to follow through on that thought. Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space, which is working on a fully reusable rocket called Nova, reportedly became a focus of Altman’s interest.

Nova is expected to have its first launch in 2026. Just this week, Celestis announced that Stoke Space would use Nova to send cremated remains and DNA samples into deep space for Celestis’ “Infinite Flight” mission in late 2026.

Much has changed on the AI frontier in recent weeks. OpenAI is facing a strong challenge from Google and its Gemini chatbot — and this week, Altman ordered OpenAI to refocus urgently on upgrading ChatGPT, its flagship AI platform. Such down-to-earth market concerns may have been one of the factors putting Altman’s space aspirations on hold.

A spokesperson for Stoke Space said the company would not comment on the Journal’s report.

There’s another Seattle-area space venture that may well offer the kind of play that Altman is looking for: Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud is developing its own platform for AI data centers in space. Like Stoke Space, Starcloud went through the startup accelerator program at Y Combinator, which Altman ran for a time before he became OpenAI’s CEO.

Last month, Starcloud had its first test satellite launched into space with an Nvidia data-processing chip on board. The startup is already partnering with a Colorado-based company called Crusoe to offer limited GPU processing capacity in space by early 2027.