Kevin Weil, a tech veteran known for his work at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, Seattle’s best-funded startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.
“It’s really easy for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil while he was putting together Stoke in 2020 and shortly after joining Y Combinator’s winter cohort. “I graduated from engineering, I started a company, I didn’t know how to raise money, I didn’t know how Silicon Valley works, I didn’t have a network. [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fund Scribble Ventures] he comes with all that background and was able to help me think about raising money and getting the company off the ground.
The two have been talking while Lapsa is raising $1.34 billion — including a $510 million Series D funding round through 2025 — to build a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now, apparently the time is right for Weil to join the board as a director to help continue to scale the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and did not respond to TechCrunch’s outreach.
Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms, which doesn’t appear on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research, leaving the company after that program’s work was widely distributed across the frontier lab in April. He served as chief product officer of OpenAI from June 2024 until October 2025.
Weil’s latest work raises one obvious question: OpenAI’s Sam Altman was reportedly kicking the tires on Stoke last year, considering an investment in rival SpaceX. Could Weil be the link between a frontier AI lab and a potential partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumours” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself.
Stoke is developing a rocket, the Nova, which is intended to be completely reusable and can be flown repeatedly. As no one has done before, SpaceX is coming very close with its massive Starship rocket. The technical challenges of reusing a rocket—particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space—have deterred even deep-pocketed space investors. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, flirted with this approach, but did not put it forward.
Now, however, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut — with much of its value hinged on Elon Musk’s promises that Starship will fly a mission this year — has vindicated 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 get a rocket flying at the right price always promises to make a killing.
“The world can see that the launch has not been resolved,” said Lapsa. “The idea of full, rapid recycling was still young at the time … that’s now the norm, and people see the inevitable now.”
Notably, the idea of building distributed data centers in space to harness solar energy and escape political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some capitalists. The main obstacle is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “only make sense for quick reuse,” Lapsa said, which could be Stoke’s key differentiator as its rocket takes flight.
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; he was one of four professional cutters and movers who joined the US Army Reserve in an effort to improve recruitment and cooperation between the Army and industry. And this is not his first time in the space business. Weil has served as president of Planet Labs, an Earth observation satellite company, for three years since its launch in 2021.
Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it closes in on delivering a performance car, however, the company has to get started.
“We have a good piece of risk behind us, we have a lot to go,” said Lapsa. “We will work hard, and we will go when it is ready.”
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