Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined its board of directors Stoke Spacea well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.
“It’s very simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch about meeting Weil when he co-founded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s. winter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to raise funds. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [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 funds and starting the company.
The two continued to talk while Lapsa raised $1.34 billion — including a $510 million Series D funding round in 2025 — to build a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now, the time is obviously 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 previous work focused on digital products and platforms, which are apparently not on Stoke’s roadmap. He recently led OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research, leaving the company after that program’s work was spread more widely across the frontier lab in April. He previously served as Chief Product Officer of OpenAI from June 2024 to October 2025.
Weil’s latest work raises an obvious question: was he OpenAI’s Sam Altman according to information kicking the tires in Stoke last year, considering an investment in its own rival SpaceX. Could Weil be the link between the 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 building a rocket, the Nova, which is intended to be fully reusable and capable of being flown again and again. No one has ever done this, with SpaceX coming closest with the massive Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket — particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere from space — have deterred even the deepest-pocketed space investors. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach but has not prioritized it.
But now SpaceX’s IPO — with much of its value based on Elon Musk’s promises that Starship will fly operational missions this year — has proven 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 reasonably priced rocket that flies regularly promises to make a killing.
“People are realizing that the launch is not yet resolved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of full, rapid reuse was a bit out there at the time … it’s now rather normalized and people see the inevitability now.”
In particular, the idea of building distributed data centers in space to harness solar energy and avoid political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The main hurdle there is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space-based data centers “only really make sense with full rapid reusability,” Lapsa said, which could be a key differentiator for Stoke as its rocket takes off.
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 technology movers and shakers who joined the US Army Reserve in an effort to improve recruiting and cooperation between the military and industry. And it’s not his first time in the space business. Weil served as president of Planet Labs, an earth observation satellite company, for three years as it went public in 2021.
Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it nears delivery of a commercial launch vehicle, however, the company must execute.
“We have a large part of the risk behind us, we have more ahead of us,” Lapsa said. “We’re going to work as hard as we can and go when it’s ready.”
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