Nine Families, Six Granted, One Man on Two Thirds of Them
Stoke Space holds 9 patent families: 6 granted and 3 published and pending. Filing began in 2020, with the most recent published filing dated 2025-03-04. The families appear in 4 patent offices: Israel, South Korea, United States and PCT.Patent figures from Google Patents Public Data, reviewed 2026-09-15. Funding: $1B Series E, Spark Capital, Gaingels and Y Combinator, 2026-09-08.
Stoke Space raised a billion dollars on a reusable launch thesis. The patent file is small, old enough to be public, and pointed almost entirely at one hard problem: getting a vehicle back through the atmosphere intact. Does nine families hold a billion-dollar position?
A billion dollars lands on a 2019 company
Stoke Space was founded in 2019. The Series E came from Spark Capital, Gaingels and Y Combinator, and it is a billion dollars against a company doing reusable transport of cargo to and from orbit. That is a number that buys factories, test stands and headcount. It does not buy filing dates. Whatever intellectual position exists today was staked years before this cheque cleared.
So the question is what the money arrived on top of. The last publicly visible filing is dated 4 March 2025, eighteen months before the round. Anything filed since is still inside the publication window and invisible. What follows is the record as it stands, and the record starts in 2020, the year after founding, which is early for a hardware company with nothing flying.
Nine ticks, six of them already solid
Nine families since 2020. Two in 2020, one in 2022, two in 2023, three in 2024, one in 2025. Six have granted. Three are published and pending, and the first of those is close enough that it could grant at any time. Jurisdictions are US, WO, plus Israel and Korea. That is a deliberate spread for a portfolio this size, not a default domestic filing habit.
Read the titles and the thesis is unmistakable. An actively-cooled heat shield system and the vehicle carrying it. A heat shield with a recessed dual-expansion nozzle. An atmospheric re-entry vehicle with a skewed heat shield. Claims cluster in F02K, which is jet and rocket propulsion, and B64G, spacecraft. Six granted families are enforceable today, which is the part that distinguishes this file from a pile of applications.
Six granted families are enforceable today, not someday.
One name on two thirds of the file
Nineteen inventors are named across nine families. Andrew Lapsa appears on six of the nine. Thomas Feldman appears on three, Brent Andrew Bradbury on three. The rest appear once or twice, in the clusters you would expect when a small team brings in specialists for a specific structure and then moves on. This is not a distributed research organisation. It is one technical thesis with a consistent author.
That shape has consequences. Concentration like this usually means the claims are coherent: the same person framing the same problem across five years tends to file claims that fit together rather than overlap awkwardly. It also means the institutional memory of why each claim reads the way it does sits with very few people. Hiring reflects the same concentration, with twenty-nine hardware roles open alongside thirty-nine in software and AI.
Nine families against three thousand
On the same CPC groups over five years, State Grid China filed 3,309 families. Toyota, 1,329. Guangdong Power Grid, 1,263. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, 820. Southeast University, 770. China Electric Power Research Institute, 733. Stoke Space has nine. On this scale the company is barely a dot, and there is no honest way to present that differently.
But the crowd is mostly not competing on the same question. A power grid operator and a bank land in these groups through classification adjacency, not through building re-entry vehicles. What the comparison does establish is that count is worthless here as a measure of position. In a space this densely populated, what matters is whether nine sets of claims are drawn tightly around something specific. The titles suggest they are.
In a crowd of three thousand, scope is the only thing that separates you.
Who is reading these nine files
Blue Origin cites the portfolio in four publications. Blue Origin Mfg in two. Citibank NA in two, Dell in two, Pudeshi Beijing in one. Citations are not accusations and they are not endorsements. They are a record of which examiners and which drafting teams found this work relevant enough to place in the prior art of their own applications.
The Blue Origin count is the one that carries weight, because it is a launch organisation citing a launch organisation's claims on re-entry structures. Six citations across two related entities is a small number in absolute terms and a meaningful one for a nine-family file from a company founded in 2019. It means the claims are visible inside the field they were written for.
Thin file, sharp edges, unfinished picture
Here is the plain version. Stoke Space filed early, filed narrowly, and filed on the specific structural problem that reusable orbital transport turns on: surviving re-entry with a shield that also has to pass thrust through it. Six of those nine families are granted. One inventor anchors two thirds of them. The field is enormously crowded and almost none of that crowd is working on this.
The gap in the picture is eighteen months wide. The last visible filing predates the Series E by that much, and a company that just raised a billion dollars with one hundred open roles is unlikely to have stopped. What exists today is a coherent, enforceable, deliberately small position. What was filed after March 2025 will decide whether it stays small.
Is a nine-family portfolio actually a moat?
Small portfolios can be strong or ornamental, and no single indicator separates the two. Grant status, inventor concentration and citation by direct peers each mean something, but only together do they describe a defensible position.
A filing habit, not position
Applications pending, claims diffuse, nobody in the field reading them. The portfolio documents activity rather than protecting anything.
Thin file, sharp edges, unfinished picture
When the three pending families publish their grants, do the claims extend beyond heat shield structures into vehicle-level architecture?
Do filings surfacing after the eighteen-month gap keep Andrew Lapsa as lead inventor, or does authorship spread with the new headcount?
Does the thirty-nine-person software and AI hiring push produce filings in a CPC space the current nine families do not touch?
Do the Israel and Korea filings get repeated in later families, or were those one-off jurisdictional bets?
Following those four would tell you whether the billion dollars is funding a wider claim space or simply industrialising the one already staked.
Common questions
How many patents does Stoke Space have?
Stoke Space holds 9 patent families as reviewed in 2026-09: 6 granted and 3 published and pending.
How many of Stoke Space's patents are granted?
6 of the 9 families are granted, or 67 percent. The remaining 3 are published and still under examination.
What technology do Stoke Space's patents cover?
Stoke Space's claims cluster in F02K, spacecraft (B64G) and F42B. Recent filing titles include "actively-cooled heat shield system and vehicle including the same" and "heat shield with recessed dual-expansion nozzle, and vehicle including the same".
Where has Stoke Space filed patents?
Stoke Space's families appear in 4 patent offices: Israel, South Korea, United States and PCT.
Which companies file patents in the same areas as Stoke Space?
The same CPC groups drew State Grid China, Toyota, Guangdong Power Grid and Industrial & Commercial Bank Of China over the last five years. Shared classification indicates a common technology field rather than direct competition.
Who cites Stoke Space's patents?
Patent records from Blue Origin, Blue Origin Mfg, Citibank Na and Dell cite Stoke Space's filings. A citation indicates a reference to the work, not evidence of commercial use.
Who invented Stoke Space's patents?
19 inventors are named across the portfolio. The most frequently named is Andrew Lapsa. Inventor names do not establish ownership, which is determined by assignment records.
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