Loft Orbital was a startup in the space infrastructure sector that raised $140 million through a new funding round. The investment giant BlackRock led this round.

Loft, a San Francisco-based firm launched its first space missions earlier in the year. Loft plans to make use of this capital to expand its business and to double its staff.

“The best way to think of us is we provide space-infrastructure-as-a-service,” Loft Orbital co-founder and COO Alex Greenberg told CNBC.

“If you’re a customer with either a single payload or a constellation that you want to put in space, but you don’t want to be the one building or designing your own satellite – dealing with the manufacturer, dealing with the launch provider, and then actually operating it once it’s in space – then you work with someone like us,” Greenberg added.

This $130m raise included contributions from CEAS Investments, Foundation Capitals, Uncork Capitals, UbiquityVC, and others. Loft also raised an additional $10 million from the same investors through convertible notes, meaning short-term debt, which converted during the round – bringing its total capital raised to $140 million.

Loft refused to reveal its valuation after the raise.

Loft is also based in San Francisco and has production and other facilities in Denver and Toulouse. Loft’s co-founder Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the CEO of Loft. He told CNBC that the company currently has 70 employees.

To date, Loft has launched two spacecraft – which the company calls YAMs, or “Yet Another Mission” – that are in orbit currently, each carrying several payloads for customers. Loft is currently serving more than 20 customers including NASA and DARPA.

Greenberg stressed that it typically takes between 18 and 36 months for a satellite to be delivered after an order is placed in the space industry. Loft ordered its spacecraft to expedite the process, despite not knowing how it will fly, he explained.

“It’s almost like an inventory model, or a fulfillment center model — where we have the satellites in-house, a customer shows up, we stick them on and send them to the launch site,” Greenberg said, adding that the business model means Loft’s customers “can get to space in a couple of months rather than a couple of years if they were to do it themselves.”