Kevin Weil, a veteran technology executive known for his work at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.

“It’s very simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he co-founded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s winter cohort. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to raise money. 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 fundraising and getting the company off the ground.

The two continued talking as 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 seemingly right for Weil to join the board as a director to help continue scaling the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview and did not respond to TechCrunch’s communication.

Weil’s previous work has focused on digital products and platforms, which are obviously not on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research, and left the company after work on that program spread more widely across the frontier lab in April. He previously served as Product Manager for OpenAI from June 2024 to October 2025.

Weil’s latest work raises an obvious question: OpenAI’s Sam Altman was supposedly kicking Stoke’s tires last year, contemplating an investment in his own competitor SpaceX. Could Weil be the link between the frontier AI lab and a potential partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumors” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself.

Stoke is building a rocket, Nova, which aims to be completely reusable and able to fly again and again. No one has done this before, and SpaceX is the closest with its massive Starship rocket. The technological challenges posed by reusing a rocket – particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space – deterred even the deepest-pocketed space investors. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach but hasn’t made it a priority.

Now, however, the successful stock market debut of SpaceX (whose much of its value depends on Elon Musk’s promises that Starship will fly operational missions this year) has demonstrated Lapsa’s foresight. Despite the many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there are not enough rockets to go around, and the next company to regularly fly a rocket at a reasonable price promises to make money.

“The world is realizing that the launch is not resolved yet,” Lapsa said. “The idea of ​​complete and rapid reuse was a little widespread at the time… now it’s normalized and people see the inevitable.”

In particular, 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 venture capitalists. The key obstacle is the cost of putting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with rapid and complete reuse,” Lapsa said, which could be a key differentiator for Stoke when its rocket begins flying.

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 drivers who joined the U.S. Army Reserve in a bid to improve recruiting and cooperation between the Army and industry. And this is not his first time in the space business. Weil served as president of Planet Labs, a satellite Earth observation company, for three years until it went public in 2021.

However, whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it approaches delivery of an operational launch vehicle, the company has to execute.

“We have overcome a good part of the risk and we still have a lot to do,” Lapsa said. “We will work as hard as we can and we will leave when it is ready.”