OpenAI exec Kevin Weil joins Stoke Space's board

Kevin Weil, a former OpenAI and Twitter exec, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a startup building fully reusable rockets. Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa, who met Weil through Y Combinator in 2020, credits him with early fundraising help. Stoke has raised $1.34 billion, including a $510 million Series D, to launch its Nova rocket, designed to rival SpaceX’s Starship. Weil’s digital product background seems an odd fit, but his OpenAI ties hint at a possible partnership between the AI lab and Stoke. The company aims to solve the unsolved problem of rapid rocket reuse, a feat SpaceX has yet to fully achieve. Why it matters: This move signals that AI and space are increasingly intertwined, with experience from the frontier lab’s top ranks flowing into the hard tech sector as launch capacity remains a critical bottleneck.