Kevin Weil has joined the board of Stoke Space. The former OpenAI executive brings experience from Twitter, Meta, and Planet Labs to a Seattle startup that is building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.
Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa explained how Weil came to the company. Lapsa co-founded Stoke in 2020 and joined Y Combinator’s winter batch shortly after. He came from engineering with no fundraising experience and no network. Weil, an early investor with his wife Elizabeth through their fund Scribble Ventures, helped him navigate those gaps.
“It’s real simple for me,” Lapsa told TechCrunch. Weil helped Lapsa think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground. The two kept talking while Lapsa raised $1.34 billion. This included a $510 million Series D funding round in 2025. That money was intended to build a rapidly reusable rocket capable of flying this year. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and he did not respond to TechCrunch’s outreach. Weil is now joining the board as a director to help continue scaling the company.
Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms, which do not obviously appear on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research. He left the company in April after that program’s work was spread more widely across the frontier lab. He had previously served as OpenAI’s chief product officer from June 2024 until October 2025.
Weil’s last job raises one obvious question. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was reportedly kicking the tires on Stoke last year, contemplating an investment in his own SpaceX competitor. Could Weil be the link between the frontier AI lab and a possible partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumors” about OpenAI. He said Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself.
Stoke is building a rocket called Nova. It is intended to be completely reusable and can be flown again and again. No one has ever done that before. The SpaceX coming the closest with its enormous Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket deterred even space investors with the deepest pockets. This is particularly the ability to survive the extreme heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from space. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach but has not prioritized it.
Now, though, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut has proven Lapsa’s foresight. Much of its value rests on Elon Musk’s promises that Starship will be flying operational missions this year. Despite many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there are not enough rockets to go around. The next company to get a reasonably-priced rocket flying regularly promises to make a killing.
“The world is realizing that launch is still not solved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of full, rapid reuse was a little bit out there at that time…that’s now been rather normalized, and people see the inevitable now.”
The idea of building distributed data centers in space to escape political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The key obstacle there is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with full rapid reuse,” Lapsa said. This could be a key differentiator for Stoke as its rocket starts flying.
Military contracts will also be key to the company’s success. Weil has experience bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense. He was one of four tech movers and shakers who joined the US Army Reserve in a bid to improve recruitment and cooperation between the Army and industry. This is not his first time in the space business. Weil served as the president of Planet Labs, a satellite earth observation company, for three years as it went public in 2021.
Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it closes in on delivering an operational launch vehicle, the company has to execute.
“We’ve got a good chunk of the risk behind us, we’ve got more to go,” Lapsa said. “We’ll work as hard as we can, and we’ll go when it’s ready.”
What it means
For the people making things, the change is practical. Stoke aims to lower the cost of getting hardware into orbit by reusing its rockets fully. This makes space data centers viable by removing the expense of launching new rockets for every batch of chips. For Stoke, success depends on executing the Nova rocket schedule while Weil helps manage strategy and government relations.
