August's Space Dirt 🚀 (mid-month)

Welcome to the largest Space Dirt🚀 ever. At just under 7,000 words, this newsletter will no doubt get clipped in your inbox, but I hope you click through to scroll to the end - so much information in this one, including four (4!) billion-dollar raises and 10 seed rounds.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

• REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

• STEALTH NO MORE

• NOTABLE FUNDINGS

• AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

• WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

Furientis leased space in Playa Vista, CA. (source: Me!)

Salient Motion leased 31,378 SF at 4857 W 147th Street, Hawthorne, CA. This is Valar Atomics’ former space. (source: Me!)

SpaceX leased 20,683 SF at 3501 Jack Northrop Ave, Hawthorne, CA. (source: Me!)

Verustruct has moved its headquarters to Torrance, CA. (source: LinkedIn)

Heron Power announced Heron Factory One, its first large-scale manufacturing facility, in Morgan Hill, CA. Heron will invest over $100M to transform a former distribution warehouse into a facility capable of manufacturing 10,000 Heron Links a year, supporting more than 600 jobs in California. Fully ramped, Heron Factory One will produce 40 gigawatts of medium-voltage power electronics annually, equivalent to roughly three quarters of the new utility-scale generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2025. (source: LinkedIn)

Matter opened a 54,000 SF facility in Sunnyvale, CA, where it produces robotic components for customers and builds toward a future where manufacturing operates increasingly like software. (source: LinkedIn)

Prometheus signed a 100,000 SF lease at a former steel complex in West Oakland, CA. Project Prometheus, co-founded and led by Bezos and Vik Bajaj, is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer” for the physical world. (source: X)

Uptool leased space at 1825 S Grant St, San Mateo, CA. (source: Me!)

Joby Aviation has signed a lease for 45,000 SF at Alliance Air Trade Center in Haslet, part of Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport in Texas. Located within Hillwood’s 27,000-acre AllianceTexas development, the leased space marks the first significant North Texas presence by an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft manufacturer and strengthens the region’s growing role in advanced air mobility. (source: Street Insider)

Saronic has established a test site at the Port of Gulfport in Mississippi. Saronic said the site will support on-water testing and commissioning the company’s 180-foot Marauder Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels in between production and final delivery. Spanning more than 30,000 square feet, Saronic’s facility offers dedicated port access, office and warehouse space. (source: WLOX)

Anthro Energy broke ground on a factory in Louisville, KY, that can make enough battery materials for more than 300,000 electric vehicles. But the facility’s headline output, 25 gigawatt-hours’ worth of electrolytes, is just part of the story. Anthro’s factory could give solid-state batteries a much needed boost in the U.S. To build the factory, Anthro received a $24.9M award from the Department of Energy under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and another $18.4M in investment tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. Kentucky pitched in another $2.3M in tax incentives in exchange for creating 110 permanent jobs. Anthro’s new facility is scheduled to start production in 2028. (source: TechCrunch)

Ginkgo Bioworks is building 4 new autonomous labs at MIT, Caltech, Northwestern, and the University of Maryland. The US National Science Foundation is funding 3 of the labs as part of the new efforts under President Trump’s Genesis Mission to bring AI into science. (source: X)

Vulcan Elements is building its 1.1 million-square-foot rare earth magnet manufacturing facility in Benson, NC. Once operational, its Benson facility will:
- Support 10,000 metric tonnes of annual magnet production capacity
- Deploy some of the first pieces of rare earth magnet manufacturing equipment built and designed in the U.S. this century
- Expand domestic supply for magnets used in defense systems, data centers, robotics, automotive platforms, drones, and other advanced technologies. (source: LinkedIn)

Orion Edge 3x’s its physical footprint with its new 8,008 SF facility at 5555 W Waters Avenue, Tampa, FL. (source: Tampa Bay Economic Development Council)

Grounded opened a new 50,000 SF manufacturing facility in Detroit, MI where it will take its core modular design business and scale it to be vehicle-agnostic, allowing the startup to customize fit to the different kinds of fleet needs — be they electric or combustion-powered. Production at the facility starts this month, according to the startup, with capacity ramping up next year. (source: TechCrunch)

Lumina has acquired its first factory. At 250,000 SF, the facility includes 20+ CNC machines, multiple cutting beds, and a team of more than 100 people. Beyond serving external customers, the factory will bring dozens of Lumina vehicle fabrications in-house over the next 8–10 months. As Lumina scales Moonlander deployments and prepares to launch BladeRunner, this facility will support its steel production needs through 2026 and 2027. Lumina owns the land, the building, and the equipment. (source: X)

Aeon has a new 120,000 SF production facility in Cedar Park, TX, where it will produce missile rounds to deliver on eight-figure contracts and critical military hardware used in drones and interceptors. (source: LinkedIn)

ARK Electronics has expanded its U.S. drone operations with a new facility at 5965 S 900 E, Murray, UT. (source: Unmanned Systems Technology)

North Wind, an independent leader in aerospace testing, today broke ground on the North Wind Aerospace & Hypersonic Research and Testing Complex (AHRTC) in Rosemount, MN. The $1+ billion state-of-the-art facility will support aerospace and hypersonic research and testing at UMore Park in Rosemount. Development of the AHRTC is supported through a public-private partnership that combines federal and state support with private investment. North Wind finalized its purchase of the 60-acre site in December 2025. (source: North Wind)

Zenno Astronautics, a New Zealand startup focused on applying superconducting magnets for spacecraft attitude control and acceleration, plans to relocate to Los Angeles, CA by early fall. While Los Angeles is more expensive than other U.S. cities, Zenno chose the location because it offers access to “partners, customers, investors and talent,” Arshavsky said. Some Zenno employees will relocate from New Zealand. The company will also hire locally. (source: SpaceNews)

STEALTH NO MORE

Riven emerged from stealth with a $7.9M pre-seed and a Department of Energy Genesis Mission award, one of only 17 industry-led proposals funded out of 238 submissions. Cerberus Ventures led the round, with New System Ventures named as co-lead by the founders, and participation from Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, and CLAI. The company is applying AI and lab automation to critical mineral separation and refining, and already has one autonomous lab running in New York on partner feedstocks it declined to name. Riven is not a mining company. The bottleneck it is attacking sits downstream of the mine, in solvent extraction, where you design chemicals that preferentially bind to one metal and pull it out of a pile of ore. Finding the right molecule takes an enormous number of experiments, which is why the expertise migrated to China over four decades and why standing up new Western capacity takes fifteen years or more. CEO Chip Breitenkamp is an experimental chemist who came from NanoGraf, where he watched better battery materials die on the vine because commercializing them meant importing processed inputs. CTO Orion Archer Cohen is a computational chemist who builds the simulation systems that predict molecular behavior. Their claim is that autonomous labs running hundreds to thousands of experiments a day can compress a thirty-year process to three. (source: Tectonic)

Hebbian Robotics launched from YC's S26 batch with APIs for searching and analyzing physical AI data at scale, letting data providers get on-demand quality signals without standing up infrastructure or training a model to find out. No funding has been disclosed beyond YC. The company has since joined NVIDIA's Inception Program and ships Pareto, a public reference implementation of what the APIs can do. The problem is a market failure rather than a technical one. Model developers want robot and egocentric data they can trust. The providers collecting it are optimizing for operational throughput and have no bandwidth to generate quality metrics on the side. Hebbian sells the measurement layer: prove compliance when a buyer imposes per-collector hour limits, monitor for drift and regression after a collection SOP changes, verify suspected duplicate samples with a single call. Brandon Ong's previous AI startup was Sequoia-backed, his research on low-resource languages topped Stanford's SEA-HELM benchmark, and he dropped out of a joint robotics PhD at Columbia and NTU. Kingston Kuan spent years at Jane Street on systems scaling to millions of messages per second, then worked on Verkada's core video surveillance platform handling large-scale multimodal data. The two come out of embodied AI and ECE programs at Columbia and the National University of Singapore, and the angel list runs through Oracle, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. The company is incorporated as a public benefit corporation and says it wants to back providers collecting high quality data ethically, which is an unusual thing to put in a launch post about API infrastructure. (source: Y Combinator)

Neuromorphic launched from Y Combinator's S26 batch with $500,000 in funding, building robot brains that attach to any body and are managed through Slack, email, and phone. Within a week of first contact, the team signed a leading biotechnology company and deployed a robot into its wet lab, where it now runs autonomously around the clock and has completed more than 1,500 tasks. The company packages sensors, compute, and software into a physical unit that mounts to different robot bodies. An onboard LLM orchestrator converts plain-language instructions into workflows assembled from reusable skills: navigate, pick up an object, open a refrigerator, inspect an area. Sensor-based safety loops watch every action. The business runs on a Robotics-as-a-Service model, monthly subscription or usage fee rather than an equipment purchase. Founders Cem Şeref Toker (Cambridge) and Ege Doğanay (Bilkent) were high school FIRST Robotics teammates who cold-reached Vatan Aksoy Tezer for mentorship, then spent three years winning competitions together. Tezer is a core MoveIt maintainer at PickNik who built navigation stacks from scratch at KABAM Robotics across 100-plus deployed robots and scaled ASRS systems at Rapyuta Robotics past a thousand. Özgür Soysal, a Stanford PhD student, is the fourth co-founder. (source: Y Combinator)

Applied Electrodynamics launched from YC's S26 batch with WaveSight, a camera that sees through walls using radio waves. No funding has been disclosed beyond YC. The team is pointing at $20 billion a year in avoidable construction rework caused by pipes, cables, and structural elements that stay hidden until somebody discovers them mid-project. The platform behaves like a camera rather than an instrument: no training required, no harmful radiation, everything processed on device. It produces a point cloud natively to scale and accurate to a millimeter, and it penetrates sheetrock, tile, marble, quartz, brick, insulation, and composite layers that thermal and LiDAR cannot. Beyond construction, the company is aiming at manufacturing-line inspection, cargo screening, and security. The four founders have worked together more than eight years, shipped multiple zero-to-one hardware products, and hold 250-plus patents between them. Bilgehan Avser holds a PhD in electromagnetics, led antenna technologies across four iPhone generations including the first phones with UWB and 5G mmWave, and served as Head of Technology at Humane through its acquisition by HP. Brian Huppi built the earliest iPhone prototypes and co-invented both iPhone multitouch and the Nest Learning Thermostat. George McLean is an MIT physicist who built X-ray imagers, retinal implants, and the world's smallest laser projector. Paul Leutheuser was a product design lead at Apple and Humane and co-invented haptic Touch ID. (source: Y Combinator)

Neuron Industries launched from YC's S26 batch, building a replacement for the programmable logic controller, the rugged computer that runs nearly every factory, wastewater plant, pipeline, grid substation, and cold storage facility in America. No funding has been disclosed. Pilots are live in chemical processing, electronics manufacturing, wastewater treatment, and small modular reactors. CEO Dennis Ren puts the addressable market at 30 million PLC units a year and describes the incumbents as a time machine, saying the industry smells like Nokia before it died. PLCs were invented when General Motors pushed vendors for a standard machine controller so electricians wouldn't have to rewire plants by hand every model year. Siemens and Rockwell consolidated the market and built vendor lock on proprietary programming environments and millions of lines of code nobody wants to rewrite. The deeper problem is the workforce: the industry runs on ladder logic, a 1970s graphical language modeled on relay wiring diagrams, barely taught in American universities. In Control Engineering's most recent survey, 45 percent of controls engineers were 60 or older and 2 percent were under 30. Neuron's answer is Cortex, an American-made controller programmed in Python with an IDE that turns plain English into control code, running air-gapped on prem with optional cloud. It speaks EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, and Modbus TCP, reaching roughly 99 percent of third-party I/O, so a plant can swap the brain without replacing the sensors and drives around it. Ren was founding EE at Freeform, built the hardware stack for its metal 3D-printing factory, and came from the Apple Vision Pro founding team, Amazon Go, and Tesla Fremont. CTO Kenneth Rhee spent a decade in enterprise software at Amazon and GOAT Group before founding and exiting WorkIPO. (source: LinkedIn)

Lumilens emerged from stealth on August 6 with more than $700 million in new Series C funding, bringing total capital raised above $900 million at a $5.51 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital, with participation from Addition, Alkeon, Harbourvest, J.P. Morgan Private Capital, Lingotto, Mayfield, MVP Ventures, Peak XV, Qualcomm Ventures, Redpoint, Thomvest, AICONIC, EDBI, Seifdune, and others. Founded in early 2024, the company went from inception to a qualified product shipping into a hyperscaler's production AI data centers under a multi-billion-dollar agreement in two years. The constraint Lumilens is selling against is physical. At the data rates AI demands, electrical signals survive about a meter and a half over copper, which confines a tightly coupled GPU domain to a single rack. A 400,000-GPU data center needs more than 2.4 million optical transceivers and five million fiber strands, and McKinsey projects 800G transceiver production will fall 40 to 60 percent short of demand through 2027, with 1.6T shortfalls of 30 to 40 percent persisting through 2029. Lumilens builds for both fabrics: near-package and co-packaged optics that bring optical I/O directly to the GPU, and pluggable transceivers at 800G and 1.6T for the scale-out network. Everything runs on LumiCore, an in-house platform spanning silicon photonics, mixed-signal ICs, electrical-optical interposers, and optical systems. Founder and CEO Ankur Singla previously built Contrail Systems and Volterra, acquired by Juniper and F5, and served as CTO at Aruba. CTO Ted Schmidt was a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper who pioneered its silicon photonics work off the 2016 Aurrion acquisition. (source: The Wall St Journal)

Libra Robotics launched from YC's S26 batch building collaborative robot squads for solar installation. No funding has been disclosed beyond YC. In a few weeks inside the batch the team completed a live field demonstration at a solar robotics demo day in Texas, the first event of its kind in the industry, secured product liability insurance, and established R&D and compatibility partnerships with three or more leading racking and fastening companies. Most construction robotics companies automate one task, or part of one. Libra covers the entire workflow after PV module pallets arrive on site: transportation, pickup, rack-relative alignment, placement, and fastening. Each robot has a defined role and fleets get configured against a project's cost and schedule requirements. One person supervises four or more robots through a screen and an e-stop, without being on site and without teleoperating anything. The fleet has been tested at night, which opens the door to continuous operation. Libra sells to EPCs through Robotics-as-a-Service, so there is no purchase and no upfront capital, and works directly with racking and module manufacturers to certify compatibility. Jermaine Zhao brings a Stanford background in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering plus experience building and deploying agricultural robots from scratch. Yaojing Huang defended a Stanford PhD in construction robotics and has worked with more than 40 contractors and construction robotics startups worldwide. The company was founded in 2025 and covers projects from 1 MW upward across utility-scale, C&I, community solar, and agrivoltaics. (source: LinkedIn)

Discovered Materials closed a $9M seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners after coming out of Y Combinator, with investment from Peak XV Partners and angels Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. The company is using swarms of AI agents to hunt for novel materials that make integrated circuits run cooler. Alongside the raise it released hundreds of new candidate materials and a Material Discovery Bench designed to track how frontier models perform on the problem. The pipeline runs in two stages. Anthropic models in a custom harness generate material leads, then foundational physics models the team trained run simulations to verify whether the candidates are actually interesting. Co-founder Akash Ramdas earned a doctorate in materials science from Stanford, where he estimates he managed 20 guesses a day. Advaith Sridhar, who worked on agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs, says the agent swarm runs thousands a day on the cloud. The hard part is not generation. It is the engineering trade-space: a material that dissipates heat well may be impossible to fabricate a chip from, or its electrical properties may be compromised. Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra described it as whack-a-mole with atomic structures, where a material only counts if every property converges at once. The plan is to patent the use of specific materials in GPUs, or the process for making chips from them, and license to chipmakers. Sridhar hopes to have patentable candidates within a year. (source: TechCrunch)

NOTABLE FUNDINGS

Hadrian announced $1.37B in new equity financing at a $7.87B valuation. The financing will support new factories, expanded R&D, and additional production capabilities as Hadrian builds the industrial infrastructure required to deliver complete mission-critical systems at speed and scale. The financing will be co-led by WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, and Baillie Gifford. JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group joined as anchor co-lead, investing through the firm's Security and Resiliency Initiative, a program dedicated to strengthening the industries critical to national and economic security. The round also included major participation from 1789 Capital, as well as Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, funds managed by Apollo, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., CapitalG, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Altimeter, Construct Capital, and existing investors. (source: PR Newswire)

Valar Atomics is excited to announce the closing of a $1B Series B financing led by Sequoia Capital. As part of this new partnership, Valar welcomes Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire to Valar’s board of directors. Sequoia was joined in this round by Apandion, Atreides Management, Conviction, Dream Ventures, HOF Capital, Point72, Riot Ventures, Snowpoint Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and other both new and longtime investors. Finally, in addition to the $1B of equity, Valar is excited to announce the closing of a $200M credit facility led by Erebor Bank, as administrative agent, and J.P. Morgan, alongside Crescent Cove and Hercules Capital. (source: Valar)

Base Power announced a $1B Series D financing at a $13B post-money valuation, alongside the launch of Base Core: a home battery designed from the ground up to support the grid, now in production at Base Factory 1 in Austin. The Series D is led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment(source: BusinessWire)

Stoke Space is raising $1B to accelerate development and production of a fully reusable rocket to challenge SpaceX, people familiar with the matter said. Stoke aims to close the round this month, the people said. The latest funding round follows Stoke's $860M extended Series D, which closed in February. The Kent, WA-based company said it had raised $1.34B to date. If successful, the new round would catapult Stoke ahead of competitor Relativity Space, which boasted a $4.2B valuation in 2021 prior to debuting its first spacecraft. Relativity later faced problems with its 3D-printed rocket technology. (source: Bloomberg)

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced that it raised $1B of additional equity financing. This capital raise is the single largest funding round among fusion energy companies worldwide since CFS announced its $1.8B Series B round in 2021. With this capital, and the $863M the company raised last year, CFS has now raised a total of $4B. This $4B represents about 30 percent of the total capital raised by the fusion industry to-date, reinforcing CFS’ position as the world’s largest and leading fusion company. (source: Commonwealth Fusion Systems)

The United States Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital announced an $820M commitment to Performance Drone Works (PDW) to help strengthen America's drone industrial base and expand domestic manufacturing of critical components. This financing will help accelerate PDW’s mission to put decisive airpower in the hands of every operator. It also reinforces an important national priority: strengthening America's ability to design, manufacture, and scale critical drone systems and components here at home. (source: LinkedIn)

Etched raised $700M at a $21B valuation from Jane Street, joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone. (source: X)

Antora Energy, a leading U.S. energy storage company, today announced its closing on $550M in Series C funding. The oversubscribed round was co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, with participation from new investors including Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Activate Capital, John Doerr, Westly Group, StepStone Group, and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures. Existing investors also contributed to the round, including Decarbonization Partners, Impact Science Ventures, Trust Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital. The Series C advances the company’s work to deliver affordable, reliable energy at the scale and speed that American industry and data centers require. The round will accelerate the deployment of large-scale projects across the country, enable Antora to expand production and establish a second U.S. manufacturing hub, and further strengthen the company’s domestic supply chain. (source: Antora Energy)

K2 Space, the leading manufacturer of big, high-power satellites, announced today a $500M Series D funding round at a $6.8B valuation. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ led the round, with participation from CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.*, and other existing investors. With this latest round, K2 has cumulatively raised over $1B in capital and secured over $1B in signed commercial and government contracts to build the biggest, high-power, and high-payload mass satellites currently flying in space. (source: PR Newswire)

Mariana Minerals announcing a $310M Series B financing, led by Khosla Ventures, with continued support from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and new participation from Greenoaks, Halo Fund, Pax Ventures, StepStone Group, BHP Ventures, Washington Harbour Partners, Greycroft, General Innovation Capital Partners, Mitsubishi Corporation, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and Earthshot Ventures, with a number of additional strategic capital partners joining the round. This round brings the company’s total parent and project capital raised to date to approximately $400M. (source: Mariana Minerals)

Neros announced a $250M Series C at a post-money valuation of $2.5B, co-led by Sequoia Capital and American Strategic Technology Fund (ASTF), with participation by Interlagos, Valor Equity Partners, Allen & Company, Thiel Capital, Spark Capital, and Dylan Field. These funds will accelerate the development and production ramps for new drone programs, including Archer AI, an FPV platform augmented with autonomy features including Terminal Guidance and GPS-denied Position Hold, and Bandit, a c-UAS interceptor drone intended to counter Class 2 and 3 drone threats, including Shahed-style systems. (source: Neros)

Smack announced a $61M Series B fundraise. This newest fundraise brings Smack’s total to over $90M. The Series B round was led by Costanoa Ventures and First In, with additional participation from new and existing investors. In addition to scaling the hardware development for Alpha, the new funding will be used to rapidly increase model scope across domains and warfighting functions, and to recruit top AI research and engineering talent. (source: Smack)

Heaviside Industries, a builder of multi-domain precision munitions platforms, announced a $60M Series B financing. Felicis led the round with significant participation from Hedosophia and additional participation from Menlo Ventures, Cantos, Flume Ventures, Qstar Capital, Friends & Family Capital, Anorak Ventures, MVP Ventures, and others. Raised three months after the company emerged from stealth, the financing values Heaviside at $600M. Heaviside will use the Series B financing to ramp the company’s production capacity, accelerate hiring, fulfill existing customer commitments, and meet future demand. (source: Heaviside Industries)

Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by two Nigerians in their early twenties (not to make you feel too bad about yourselves), announced exclusively to Tectonic that it has raised another $18M to officially close out its $52M seed round. Existing backers 8VC, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, Belief Capital, and SV Angel participated in the round, alongside new investor Norleo Space Investments. Other all-star investors include Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Terra couldn’t comment on the company’s most recent valuation, but CEO Nathan Nwachuku told Tectonic that it was in the nine-figure realm after the $22M seed round extension in February. The company first raised $11.75M led by 8VC at the start of the year, then followed that up with a $22M bridge round led by Lux in February. (source: Tectonic) 

Lydian, the company redefining the economics of synthetic aviation fuel, announced the close of a $43M Series A financing led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from AP Ventures, Builders Vision, and continued support from existing investors including Congruent Ventures, Galvanize, Grok Ventures, Overture, Union Square Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. (source: PR Newswire)

Aurelius Systems announced it has successfully closed a $40M Series A funding round. Draper Associates and KAS Venture Partners co-led the investment, with participation from General Catalyst, Hanwha Asset Management Venture Fund, Outlander, Alumni Ventures, Bravo Victor Venture Capital (BVVC), Detroit Venture Partners, Decisive Point, and other investors. The new funding is earmarked to continue advancing the Company’s flagship platform, Archimedes, through technical development, scaling, and expanding operations and production. It will also support vertical integration to reduce supply chain risk, improve availability of critical components, strengthen long-term manufacturing resilience and readiness, and accelerate delivery to customers. The additional funding will also be used to broaden platform offerings and expand into new markets. (source: Aurelius Systems)

WindBorne Systems announced $37M in Series B funding, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with participation from Translink Capital, Lux Capital, and its existing investors. (source LinkedIn)

Critical Energy raised a $27M seed round. (source: LinkedIn)

Freight technology startup Revoy raised $27M in a Series A funding round. Standard Capital led the round, bringing the company's total funding to $41M. Participating investors include: Y Combinator, Doerr Capital, Time Ventures, Leap Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, and Paul Graham. (source: X)

Intropy, a London-based startup, has raised $11M in seed funding led by Felix Capital, with participation from Quiet Capital and existing investors General Catalyst and firstminute capital. Founded in 2024 by co-founder and CEO Franziska Kirschner and co-founder and CTO YihKai Teh, Intropy builds what it calls an AI-native operating system for spare parts distributors, manufacturers, and recyclers, automating inventory management, pricing, demand forecasting, and obsolescence decisions that have historically relied on spreadsheets, outdated legacy software, and extensive manual review. Intropy will use the funding to accelerate core machine learning product development, expand its systems engineering teams, open a new commercial office in New York City, and grow its presence across the US and Europe. (source: LinkedIn)

Uplift has secured a $7M seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Valor Equity Partners. The housing hardware startup plans to mass-manufacture homes on production lines using engineering principles from SpaceX and Tesla. (source: LinkedIn)

Avatar Robotics has raised $6.5M in Seed funding to scale its humanoid robotics platform for industrial labor, targeting persistent worker shortages across warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing. The round was led by AlleyCorp, alongside a pre-seed led by defy.vc, with participation from Headline, Henry Ford III, Refashiond, Paul Vogel, Jack Huffard, and Samuel Udotong. Founded in San Francisco, Avatar Robotics is building what it describes as an “unlimited workforce” by combining humanoid robots, remote human operators, and AI-driven autonomy. (source: Pulse 2.0)

HighGround has scored a $6.5M seed round. The startup, straddling Washington and New York City, aims to equip advisors, researchers, investors, and the generally curious with defense-and-aerospace market insights. HighGround's AI-fueled product, which it bills as an "intelligence layer," lets users dive into budget and contracting data; explore business profiles, buying habits, and legislation; run what-if scenarios and simulations; and pump out reports. (source: Axios)

Detroit-based Grounded announced that it has closed a $5M seed round, with repeat investments from existing backers Also Capital and Chicago-based early-stage firm The 81 Collection, along with Animal Capital, the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund, and “various SpaceX alumni,” according to founder and CEO Sam Shapiro. (source: TechCrunch)

Soctera closed $4M in seed funding backed by Anorak Ventures and Multiball Capital, with additional participation from 9Yards Capital, Mana Ventures, and Red Bear Ventures. The company will use the funding to develop its power amplifiers: the electronic devices that dictate wireless signal range and fidelity for radar, electronic warfare, satellites, and telecommunications networks. (source: PR Newswire)

Pittsburgh-based Physical AI company Shelfmark has successfully closed a $3.5M seed funding round to enhance autonomy in continuous-flow manufacturing. The investment, led by Armory Square Ventures, brings the company's total capital raised to approximately $5M. This new funding will help Shelfmark expand its intelligent production platform for manufacturers dealing with materials on reels, rolls, and continuous webs. (source: Startup Researcher)

AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

Path Robotics announced a landmark $900M deal with HII and GrayMatter Robotics to help close that gap and transform U.S. shipbuilding with physical AI. Under the agreement, HII intends to award Path Robotics up to $600M as the companies work together to expand production capacity across America's shipyards. (source: LinkedIn)

Solana Beach, CA-based drone-maker Aevex announced that it’s reached a deal to buy Baltimore-based unmanned surface vessel company BlackSea for $650M—a move that Aevex says will “deliver a leading portfolio spanning air, surface, and subsea domains.” The deal—expected to close in September—includes roughly $250M in cash and $350M in Aevex stock, priced at $27.50/share (currently at about $22.75/share). Along with the tech itself, the deal also brings over all of BlackSea’s contracts to Aevex. According to Aevex, BlackSea is set to generate $150M in revenue this fiscal year, and bringing them into the fold “is expected to bring multi‑year contract visibility, supporting an expectation of above-market growth in FY 2027 and beyond.” (source: Tectonic)

Joby Aviation announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Resonant Sciences, a Dayton, OH-based defense technology company, for approximately $500M. The acquisition will significantly expand Joby’s defense business, delivering immediate scale through a rapidly growing, EBITDA-positive business supporting active U.S. national security programs. Resonant also brings classified infrastructure, qualified products, established production operations, and longstanding customer relationships, as well as a deeply experienced technical team. By bringing together the companies’ complementary aerospace engineering capabilities, the combination will create a scaled defense growth platform that accelerates autonomy and expands the applications for Joby’s technology. Resonant operates approximately 105,000 SF of engineering, integration, testing, and manufacturing space across seven buildings in the Dayton, OH, area. An additional 125,000 SF facility is under construction, more than doubling its footprint and expanding capacity for RF testing, advanced composites and large-scale machining. Resonant also has engineering and manufacturing facilities in Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, Colorado and North Carolina. Together with Joby’s 768,000 SF of facilities in Ohio, Resonant’s expanded campus will give the combined company approximately 1 million square feet of manufacturing, integration and testing space across the Dayton region. This concentration of capabilities will establish a major hub for advanced aviation and defense technology in the birthplace of aviation, helping attract top-tier aerospace talent and industry partners to the region. Resonant's team of approximately 250 people, more than 90% of whom hold security clearances, designs and delivers advanced radio frequency and mission systems for U.S. national security customers, from next-generation antennas and radomes to electronic countermeasures. (source: Joby Aviation)

AE Industrial, a private investment firm, has finalized the acquisition of the space propulsion, power, and electronics units from L3Harris, and is launching the entity as Rocketdyne. L3Harris will retain a minority stake in the business and remain a strategic partner. The transaction re-establishes Rocketdyne as an independent company with more than 60 years of spaceflight heritage and a proven track record across civil, commercial, and national security space. With demand across the Company’s markets accelerating, driven by geopolitical competition and record government investment in space, Rocketdyne is meeting this moment with world-class talent, proven technology, and trusted customer relationships already in place. AE Industrial’s focused investment and active partnership will support Rocketdyne in deepening its role as an indispensable supplier to the space and defense industrial base. The new company will be led by Kristin Houston as Chief Executive Officer. (source: AeroEquity)

Atoms and Joby announced a strategic partnership to acquire and develop vertiport sites in the United States. The companies will initially focus on Florida, New York, and Texas, the markets where Joby is preparing to launch early operations under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), as well as California. As air taxis move from certification to early operations, the constraint will shift to the ground: aircraft will need places to land, charge, and connect passengers to the rest of their journey. Building that infrastructure rapidly, in the right locations, and at scale is expected to be the critical path to making electric flight part of daily life. (source: Joby) 

Viasat Inc. announced it selected Rocket Lab to build a satellite bus for the U.S. Space Force’s (USSF) Space Systems Command (SSC) under the Protected Tactical SATCOM-Global (PTS-G) program. The combination of Rocket Lab's high-reliability Lightning platform and Viasat's mini-GEO satellite architecture and high-performance payload will provide secure communications for the warfighter. This mini-GEO satellite will provide a next-generation, anti-jam, resilient communications capability designed to ensure secure connectivity for U.S. and allied forces operating in contested environments around the world. (source: Rocket Lab)

Boeing and Archer announced they have signed definitive agreements under which Archer will acquire Boeing’s Wisk Aero, SkyGrid, and Insitu subsidiaries. The deal will combine complementary capabilities developed over decades in autonomy, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) – creating a groundbreaking end-to-end physical AI platform for aerospace and defense. This positions Archer to deliver an end-to-end physical AI platform across commercial aerospace, defense and air traffic management that can lead the next generation of aviation. In conjunction with the transaction, Boeing and Archer are entering into a collaboration and technology-sharing arrangement through which Boeing will retain access to the Wisk core autonomous flight technology for its current and next-generation commercial and defense aircraft. The transaction allows Boeing to retain strategic upside through its stake in Archer and simultaneously focus current and future investments into Boeing’s core businesses. (source: Archer) 

Heaviside Industries, a builder of multi-domain precision munitions platforms, announced a strategic partnership with Nammo, an international aerospace and defense company headquartered in Raufoss, Norway. Nammo will serve as the warhead supplier for Heaviside’s multi-domain precision munitions platforms, providing world-class warheads and a secure, resilient supply chain. Together, the companies will deliver first-of-their-kind unmanned munitions systems with enhanced lethality, mission flexibility, and manufacturing scalability. (source: Heaviside Industries)

Boston-based software unicorn Code Metal secured an $80M OTA agreement with the U.S. Department of War to modernize and AI-enable WarMatrix, the military's primary wargaming and simulation environment. Under the contract, Code Metal's platform will enable warfighters to develop, evaluate, and adapt courses of action in hours rather than months, with applications spanning operational planning, education, force design, mission engineering, and campaign analysis. (source: BusinessWire)

Space Kinetic announced a $50M OTA award from the Space Force to develop Whirlwind—its space maneuverability and deployment system. It’s the largest award yet for the company, which raised a $12M seed round in 2025. (source: Payload)

Epirus announced that they’ve been awarded an $11M contract by the US Marine Corps for the High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) program. Under the contract, Epirus will deliver “its latest high-power microwave (HPM) system for counter-UAS and counter-swarm point defense.” The platform is equipped with a universal sled mount, which means it can be strapped on “across the Marine Corps’ manned and unmanned ground vehicle fleets,” per the company. (source: Tectonic)

Epirus announced it is supplying a radio frequency (RF) test solution for two new anechoic chambers at the Fires Innovation Science and Technology Accelerator (FISTA) in Lawton-Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The FISTA’s two new anechoic chambers, shielded, low-reflection environments for high-power microwave (HPM) and specialized RF systems testing, were built in collaboration with Epirus and modeled after the company’s Torrance, California chamber facility. The larger, at roughly 2,800 square feet, accommodates vehicles, radar systems and other oversized test articles, while the smaller, at 600 square feet, is built for rapid-turn testing of subsystems, electronics and payloads. (source: Epirus)

Rangeview announced it has been selected by Kratos Defense to develop advanced cast components for its advanced turbine engine programs. Under the funded development effort, Rangeview will develop and deliver flight-quality cast superalloy hardware with significantly shortened development lead times. The program addresses a component class the Department of Defense has repeatedly identified as a critical gap in the domestic casting industrial base. (source: Rangeview)

Swarm Aero, an Oxnard, CA-based drone company with manufacturing operations in Fayetteville, AR, received $10M in federal contracts to advance its high-rate manufacturing technology and produce aircraft components for the U.S. Air Force. This is expected to create jobs for its Fayetteville manufacturing center. The contracts with the Air Force Research Laboratory include performing research and development on the company’s novel, high-rate composite manufacturing approach and producing aircraft parts for the Air Force. (source: Talk Business)

Intellisense Systems has been awarded an $8.2M Cost Plus Fixed-Fee (CPFF) Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) and Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) contract to develop Next Generation Nuclear Flash Blindness protection systems to protect aircrews from nuclear flash blindness. This contract is to develop goggles that help ensure aircrew can safely and effectively execute their mission in a nuclear environment by replacing EEU-2A/P with comprehensive protection against flash blindness and retinal burn. (source: Intellisense Systems)

Picogrid has been selected to advance in the SpaceWERX Adaptive & Intelligent Space (AIS) Challenge. Led by HQ SF/S9C (Force Design and Analysis) in partnership with SpaceWERX, this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) opportunity is designed to accelerate the development of targeted emerging technologies that will help shape the future of U.S. Space Force on-orbit computing, sensing, and orchestration capabilities. (source: AfWERX SpaceWERX Challenge)

Rangeview announced a major contract award to operate foundry capacity producing MRO replacement parts for U.S. Navy programs, designed to address readiness challenges in the U.S. defense industrial base. The contract, which is part of the larger Department of War Defense Industrial Base-Expansion, Development, and Growth Enterprise initiative and funded through its Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program, comes amid ongoing efforts to reshore critical manufacturing. Rangeview will support this transition by combining traditional investment casting with modern software-driven production. (source: Rangeview)

Smack was awarded a competitive prototype agreement to support the Navy’s maritime operational planning and decision-making. Smack's Omega decision platform leverages our proprietary AI models to assist commanders in analyzing complex data to support campaign and mission planning. (source: Smack)

American Rheinmetall announced that it’s snagged a contract to serve as the prime integrator for a team of companies—Harbinger, Forterra, and Primordial Labs—that will develop autonomous logistics ground vehicles for the Army’s Project Sustainment initiative. The Army’s Capability Program Executive (CPE) Mission Autonomy awarded the 18-month contract through the National Advanced Mobility Consortium (NAMC). The contract value wasn’t disclosed. (source: Tectonic)

WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

SendCutSend wrote a behind-the-scenes story chronicling Poseidon Robotics’ journey, sharing how Poseidon uses SendCutSend in its workflow for custom parts.

Jason Carman of Story Inc tours us through Rangeview’s new 60,000 SF factory in El Segundo in a well-produced video.

More Rangeview and Cameron Schiller love. This piece from the Rational Optimist Society. Fun fact: As a high-school freshman, Cameron won the world’s largest robotics competition… as a one-person team, beating squads of kids.

Matthew Chang of Chang Robotics wrote an article for Fast Company’s Impact Council, Here’s how America builds again. This quote is a good preview: “Factory 5.0 is about the leap in both throughput and human potential.”

In Nathan Mintz's latest Substack, he gives us his take on what the next couple of years of the defense industry’s consolidation looks like and reminds us of perhaps the most important question in who is left standing when the dust settles: Can these guys actually build what we need, in the quantities we need, when we need it?

Michelle Volz gives us a good reality check on the ever-increasing funding rounds and reminds us that “Building real value is far harder than signaling value.”

From The Wall St Journal, The Battlefield Innovations Reshaping the Russia-Ukraine War contains exactly what the headline promises.

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like your office and/or manufacturing space or business profiled - or even your city! - let me know. It’s always fun to explore and share the different components of the hard tech industry.

Erik Stiebel
Founder and Senior Vice President
CA DRE License #02080746
424.241.4795 | [email protected] 
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