Arkaea Media Co-Founder Sells Stake in Company
Ari Lewis, co-founder of Arkaea Media (formerly Payload Space), sold his stake in the company to an undisclosed investor.
In an announcement on LinkedIn, Mo Islam, the other co-founder of the a B2B media company covering the defense, space and nuclear industry, said, “Ari Lewis has decided to step away from day-to-day operations.”
According to three people familiar with the deal, Lewis sold his stake in the company to an individual from “within the industry,” one said. Lewis declined to comment.
In an interview with AMO, Islam said, “He sold his stake for personal reasons as part of stepping away from the company.” When asked to whom the shares were sold to, Islam only said, “I can’t comment because it was a private shareholder transaction. I want to be respectful to the parties involved.”
“[Lewis] was an instrumental part of getting the business off the ground and I’m incredibly grateful for everything he contributed,” Islam said.
Islam also told AMO that he was offered the chance to sell a position of his shares, but chose not to and has sold no shares thus far. “I’m just incredibly bullish for the future of the company. I had the chance to sell a position, I chose not to. It wasn’t even a question. It was probably the easiest decision I’ve ever made,” he said.
From a management perspective, Islam said that this investor “does not have any operating governance. There’s no kind of operational influence from this investor.” He further explained that he has control of the board and owns the largest position in the company.
Robust Events
Arkaea Media, the rebranded name of Payload Research, launched in 2021 as a newsletter to cover the rapidly expanding commercialization of space. It raised $650,000 in a seed round in September 2021. Since then, it launched Tectonic, a defense-related publication, and Ignition, which is about the nuclear energy sector. In February, it announced that it had raised $1.4 million and rebranded as Arkaea.
What started as a simple newsletter has expanded into a robust events business with shows including the Tectonic Defense Summit back in March, the Ignition Summit being held on May 20th and the Payload Space Investor Summit.
The transaction, according to Islam, changes nothing for how they’re planning to operate. He said:
Our mission and editorial strategy, content strategy, all of that remains unchanged. The plan is to build the defining media platform for industries critical to national security. So space, defense, energy and a lot more. We still plan to do that through journalism, high impact events and research. We’re going to expand across all our verticals. We just launched an institutional membership program. We have a very big event announcement coming this summer which we’re super excited about. We’re investing in our research products. We’re growing the team and the ultimate goal is to own the information layer of these frontier industries.
Islam told AMO that the business now had 15 employees with roughly half being reporters and the other half on business, sales ops and events. He said the business generated $1.8 million in revenue in 2024, and while he wouldn’t share specific numbers for the year thus far, he said that 2025 revenue numbers are likely to be north of $2 million.
