July's Space Dirt 🚀 (mid-month)

I’m old enough to remember when a $30M raise was a lot of money. But these days, it’s at the bottom of my notable fundings roundup.

In this Space Dirt, some big funding rounds with even bigger valuations, plus stealth, a pod I did, and a whole lot more.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

• REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

• STEALTH NO MORE

• REAL ESTATE CORNER

• NOTABLE FUNDINGS

• AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

• WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

• HOW I CAN HELP YOU

REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

Valar Atomics leased 512,490 SF at 20333 Normandie Ave, Torrance, CA. (source: Me!)

Singularity leased 41,985 SF at 1551 W 139th St, Gardena, CA. (source: Me!)

Peak Energy, a low-cost, giga-scale grid storage company, announced it has selected Sacramento, CA, as the home of its new manufacturing facility, becoming America's first dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage systems. The 183,000 SF facility will produce up to 4 GWh of battery systems annually, enough to power nearly 4 million homes. With more than 6 GWh of customer commitments already in place, Peak's Sacramento facility will help the United States meet the rapidly increasing energy storage demand, fueled by the expansion of AI and data centers, while advancing energy security and domestic manufacturing. Peak's passively cooled sodium-ion battery energy storage systems, which reduce energy storage costs by 20% and offer a 99% uptime guarantee, are expected to enter production and begin shipments in Q1 2027. (source: Peak Energy)

McMaster-Carr leased 185,056 SF at 12300 Lakeland Rd, Santa Fe Springs, CA. (source: Me!)

Cambium is expanding its U.S. manufacturing base with a new 60,000 SF facility in Mooresville, NC, quadrupling the domestic production capacity of its SHD Composite Materials division. (source: LinkedIn)

Realta Fusion has chosen an old Oscar Mayer factory in Madison, WI, to build its research and development facility. The new center, called Forge, will create its first plasma in 2029. The Oscar Mayer site’s ample power was attractive, as was its proximity to Realta’s existing headquarters in Madison. But what ultimately pushed the startup to stay was bipartisan support from the state’s government, including the governor and the legislature. (source: TechCrunch)

Kratos is opening a new 167,000 SF advanced manufacturing facility in York, PA. This expansion boosts its ability to deliver mil‑spec hardware for air defense, missile systems, radar platforms, and C‑UAS programs, backed by $7M in new equipment and a Pennsylvania workforce of 440+. (source: Kratos Defense)

The American Housing Corporation opened its new Austin, TX campus consisting of 2 Buildings, 230,000 SF (total) with a 1,200-home-per-year capacity. (source: X)

Onnyx Systems leased 5,111 SF at 9120 Burnet Rd, Austin, TX. (source: Me!)

Scout Space is building its new 2,650 SF manufacturing facility at 2821 Dorr Avenue, Merrifield, VA. (source: FFX Now)

STEALTH NO MORE

Walden Robotics came out of stealth with $300M in funding at a $1.1B valuation — a unicorn just six months after incubation. The company was spun out of Toyota's robotics research lab by co-founder Russ Tedrake, a former Toyota Research Institute executive and MIT professor. The seed round was co-led by Deviation Capital and Toyota, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures, and AE Ventures. The differentiator is that the robot is already working. A pilot is live at a North American Toyota factory, where a Walden humanoid is pulling eight-hour shifts alongside human workers — loading and unloading car parts, cleaning machinery, and kitting for assembly. A full shift, every day. Walden builds its own hardware, software, and AI models, all designed to continuously learn and improve inside real production environments. Tedrake has been notably grounded about the challenge: everyone recognizes the magnitude of the opportunity and the technology feels ready, but success isn't assured — you have to think through the business case, the unit economics, and how to marry manufacturing and logistics with the AI. (source: Walden Robotics)

Singularity exited stealth with an $80M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis. Other backers include NEA, AE Ventures, Harpoon Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Long Journey, New Vista Capital, Y Combinator, Sunflower, and Decisive Point. Co-founders Jack Oswald and Shail Giroux are building lower-cost air defense countermeasures — Oswald describes them as dramatically cheaper than a Patriot or THAAD interceptor — though the company is staying deliberately light on specifications because it intends to deploy into two active conflict zones. The 65-plus person team includes alumni of Anduril, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Tesla, and Toyota, with advisers drawn from former American and Ukrainian defense officials. (source: Axios)

Arkenstone Defense emerged from stealth with $35M in seed funding to build the back office for defense tech — the compliance, security, workforce, and contracting infrastructure that keeps commercial companies out of the federal market. The round was led by J2 Ventures, with participation from Susa Ventures, Granite Hill Capital Partners, and Artis Ventures. It ranks in the top 1% of all security-sector seed rounds by size, a striking figure for a company focused on back-office plumbing rather than hardware. Co-founders Peter Dixon (previously founder of Second Front), William Treseder, and Rachel Olney (Stanford PhD) built it around a hard truth: building a great product for the warfighter is not the same as gaining access to the defense market. The platform bundles workforce operations, HR, payroll, insurance, personnel security, contracting support, compliance, and accreditation into a single managed service, anchored in a Professional Employer Organization that legally employs the cleared workforce every contractor depends on. While in stealth, Arkenstone acquired Anitian, a company that has done this work for two decades, folding its products into the platform. About three dozen customers have already signed on. The company is also building a government-facing tool that gives officials visibility into the compliance and security records of companies entering the defense market. (source: Tectonic)

ProvenMetal (YC S26) assembles fast-turn, American-made circuit boards out of a garage in San Francisco's Dogpatch. The pitch: send your design files, get assembled boards back in days instead of weeks. Co-founders Johnny Doyle (CEO, mechanical and manufacturing engineer) and Will Carkner (CTO, electrical engineer who built the PCB testing pipeline at Lumindt) are automating the bottlenecks that make domestic board assembly slow — quoting, design review, part procurement, and assembly. They source every component, assemble in San Francisco, and X-ray every board before it ships. The problem is both a speed problem and a sovereignty problem. Hardware companies need speed to survive, and right now they wait weeks for circuit boards. At the same time, the reshoring wave is driving demand to manufacture critical infrastructure — drones, robotics, defense, energy — domestically. But decades of offshoring hollowed out the capacity to assemble boards in the US quickly and at scale. What's left is slow and expensive. (source: Y Combinator and LinkedIn)

SubVysion (YC) is building centimeter-accurate 3D maps of underground infrastructure to help contractors dig safely. The problem is a $30 billion one: utility strikes are costly and dangerous, causing around 20 deaths a year in the U.S., and one in three is caused by 811 locator error or inaccurate maps — often hand-drawn decades ago. Co-founders Maxwell Stone and Wenson Tang are applying their skills to the water, gas, electric, sewer, and fiber lines that society runs on. Their maps help customers resolve conflicts before digging, both in the field and in the design office, saving projects from months of delays and helping excavators avoid the liability that currently falls on them. The company is already live on construction job sites across the US. (source: LinkedIn)

American Turbines is building mass-manufacturable, compact gas turbines designed for rapid deployment. The company raised a pre-seed round from Firestreak Ventures (no figure disclosed). The core idea: units ship easily, install quickly, and operate in parallel — forming clustered generation that scales with demand. Instead of a single massive turbine requiring a complex, multi-year buildout, smaller units combine into larger systems, expanding capacity incrementally. The framing is power generation reimagined as modular infrastructure, built for a world that can't afford to wait. John McElhone is the founder. (source: X)

Salem Robotics (YC S26) is building the robot autonomy layer for hazardous environments — nuclear facilities, critical infrastructure, and energy sites where routine inspection and survey work is still done by hand. In nuclear facilities, radiation protection technicians walk predetermined routes with handheld detectors and then manually transcribe measurements into digital systems: slow, inconsistent, and a waste of highly trained personnel. Salem provides software that lets robots perform these missions autonomously and reliably, using a deterministic planning approach tailored to safety-critical infrastructure to produce certifiable inspections, surveys, and reports. Co-founders Janak Panthi and Caleb Horan are PhD roboticists with a combined 15+ years of experience in the nuclear industry. They put the market at $17B-plus. (source: LinkedIn)

REAL ESTATE CORNER

Appreciated being on Morgan Barrett's podcast to talk SoCal hard tech real estate.

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NOTABLE FUNDINGS

Blue Origin is raising $10B (including $4B from Coatue and $2B from Bezos), per the NYT. First outside capital for the 25-year-old rocket biz. Blue Origin valuation is $130B. (source: X)

Helsing, Europe's leading defense AI company, announces it has raised $1.8B in a Series E, valuing the company at $18B. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Dragoneer Investment Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Disruptive, ICONIQ, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorganChase, CPP Investments | Investissements RPC, General Catalyst, Plural, and StepStone Group. (source: LinkedIn)

Quantum Systems announced the signing of its $1.2B Series D financing round, valuing the company at  ~$8B on a post-money basis. The round was co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus and Advent, and supported by a high-caliber syndicate of crossover and long-term institutional investors including BOND, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Wellington Management, A.P. Moller Holding, and Elephant Lake Ventures, as well as existing shareholders such as Balderton and HV Capital. The financing more than doubled Quantum Systems’ valuation. With the Series D, Quantum Systems will accelerate the transition from individual uncrewed platforms to an interoperable family of systems connected through MOSAIC UXS, the company’s software ecosystem for uncrewed systems. (source: Quantum Systems)

Oratomic has raised a $300M Series A financing round as the quantum computing startup moves to accelerate development of a fault-tolerant quantum computer that it says could reach commercial utility before the end of the decade. The financing was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Lowercarbon Capital, Bain Capital, Formation, Nebular, David and Scott Aaronson. Additional investors include Les Kohn, Baiju Bhatt, Infleqtion, Genius Ventures, 7i Capital and Global Frontier Investments. (source: Quantum Insider)

Energy Exploration Technologies, Inc. (EnergyX), a leading energy technology company focused on advanced lithium production and critical mineral supply chain infrastructure, announced a $225M strategic investment from Eni, the Italian-based global energy company, for a minority stake in Project Black Giant™, one of the world’s largest lithium resource projects located in Antofagasta, Chile. With planned capacity to produce up to 52,500 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year across the first two phases, and the potential to expand further through additional development phases, Project Black Giant™ is expected to position EnergyX as one of the largest lithium producers globally, as well as the world-leading direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology manufacturing company. (source: EnergyX)

British-founded maritime defense company Kraken Technology Group announced the closure of its $175M Series B funding round. The raise will support Kraken’s continued development of its uncrewed surface vessels and payload capabilities, while rapidly expanding localized manufacturing facilities around the world. The round was led by DTCP and supported by other British and European backers, including the British Business Bank, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), Rheinmetall, Inocea Group, as well as Venture Capital (VC) firms HICO, Thesiger Capital Group, BOKA Capital, Supernova Invest, and Hakluyt Capital. Early investors in the company such as NIF, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and SmartCap, alongside VCs Notion Capital and Speedinvest, have also now converted to equity following their participation in earlier funding rounds. (source: Kraken)

Quaise Energy, a developer of utility-scale superhot geothermal energy, announced the first close of its Series B financing, raising $134M with additional equity and debt capital expected to close imminently. The round was led by Prelude Ventures, with strategic investments from JERA and Idemitsu, two of Japan's largest energy companies. Nearly all existing investors, including Safar Partners, participated in the round. The proceeds from Series B will fund Project Obsidian, the world’s first commercial superhot geothermal power plant, and the continued development and commercialization of Quaise's millimeter wave drilling system towards depths in excess of 5 km. The Series B brings Quaise's total funding raised to date to $230 million. (source: Quaise)

BRINC Drones, maker of 911 response drones, just raised $125M in a round led by Motorola Solutions with participation from Index Ventures and Dylan Field. The company says its valuation has nearly doubled to just under $1B, with total funding now above $280M. (source: LinkedIn)

Higharc, the homebuilding AI company for the full design-to-construction lifecycle, announced it has raised a $95M Series C led by global software investor Insight Partners. The round brings Higharc's total funding to more than $170M. (source: Higharc)

Venus Aerospace announced the close of a $91M Series B financing led by Mercury Fund, a Houston-based venture capital firm, with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, MESH, PEAK6, Draper Associates, Starboard Star Venture Capital, Green Sands Equity, Seraph Group, Trousdale Ventures, and other new and existing strategic and institutional investors. The round will fund Venus as it scales development and production, moving its RDRE propulsion system from successful flight demonstration toward deployment for a range of near-term defense and space applications. (source: Venus Aerospace)

Peak Energy is raising an $80M Series B at a $475M pre-money valuation, Axios Pro has learned. The round comes as Peak announces plans to build a 183,000-square-foot plant in Sacramento. (see Real Estate Highlights above.) (source: Axios Pro)

Senra Systems raised a $65M Series B. The round was co-led by Interlagos and Lowercarbon. Other backers include Alumni Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and General Catalyst. (source: Yahoo! Finance)

Verve Motion just raised undisclosed strategic funding and is hiring to bring powered exosuits into aviation ground operations. IAGi invested in the Cambridge company through a round joined by HexArmor, bringing Verve Motion's total capital raised to more than $55M. International Airlines Group (IAG) will trial an aviation-specific version of the company's SafeLift exosuit, initially focused on baggage handlers. (source: LinkedIn)

Skapion raised a $36M seed round led by UP.Partners, and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Fusion VC, Stratos Ventures, tbd vc, and q fund. Skapion is building a native counter-swarm system designed to detect, engage, and neutralize these threats at scale, helping protect military personnel and critical infrastructure against the next generation of unmanned attacks. (source: LinkedIn)

Monumental announced an oversubscribed $32M round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Plural Platform and Hummingbird Ventures (source: X)

Nebex, the market infrastructure platform for the global space economy, announced a $30M seed investment led by GV (Google Ventures), with participation from other top-tier venture funds. The company also announced a banking relationship with J.P. Morgan. The capital raise and new banking relationship will help Nebex scale its platform and connect sovereign space programs with the founders and companies building new technologies to serve the space industry. "We built Nebex because we've seen firsthand that ambitious space founders struggle to deliver complex sovereign programs due to the lack of capital markets infrastructure that supports revenue and cash flow. This is something that exists in nearly every other industry," said Tejpaul Bhatia, CEO of Nebex. "Support from these organizations gives Nebex the additional leverage and financial infrastructure to build the global space economy at the scale it demands." (source: Yahoo! Finance)

Solstar Space announced a $1M strategic investment from Encore Technologies. (source: LinkedIn)

AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

Lockheed Martin has agreed to acquire Ultra Maritime from Advent International for $3.45B, expanding its undersea warfare capabilities by adding Ultra’s sonar technologies, sonobuoys, torpedo defense systems, radar solutions, and autonomous maritime sensing platforms. The business will be integrated into Lockheed Martin’s Rotary and Mission Systems division. The acquisition strengthens the company’s ability to deliver advanced anti-submarine warfare technologies to the U.S. and allied navies amid rising global defense demand. (source: LinkedIn)

Ondas Inc. announced its largest acquisition to date, agreeing to acquire autonomous aircraft maker DZYNE Technologies for $875.8M in a cash-and-stock transaction. Under the deal, DZYNE investors will receive $200M in cash and approximately $675M in Ondas stock, with more than half of the stock consideration subject to a six-month lock-up period. The acquisition strengthens Ondas’ position as a full-service autonomous defense technology platform by adding DZYNE’s military surveillance aircraft, autonomous drones, and counter-drone systems. (source: LinkedIn)

The Pentagon announced that it’s awarded two OTAs to nLIGHT Defense and Lockheed Martin Aculight to develop laser weapons systems to “advance the United States’ next-generation cruise missile and unmanned aerial system (UAS) defense architecture.” The combined awards have an initial contract value of $86M with a program ceiling of $847M. nLight said in a statement that its agreement has an initial value of $44M, with a program cap of $627M. (source: Tectonic)

Pulse Space has received a $40M award from the U.S. Space Force to develop technologies for laser-based power beaming and orbital tracking systems. The startup, founded in 2022, is working on a system that would collect energy using solar arrays and send that energy via a laser beam to remote nodes in space. The technologies developed for the system could also be used to track objects in orbit and transmit data. (source: GeekWire)

Forterra, an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) startup, has deployed over 100 Lancer AGVs to the front lines in Ukraine for logistics and casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) missions. This deployment is part of a broader $114M US Army contract via the Sandhills Project, with the vehicles successfully completing over 1,100 missions in real-world combat conditions. (source: Tectonic)

Halo Materials, an Albuquerque, NM-based startup, recieved a $1M research and development grant. The startup was one of nine New Mexico companies that received a share of the $7.5M Advanced Energy Award, administered by the state Economic Development Department’s Technology and Innovation Office. The funding granted to Halo will support the expansion of its current laboratory space, allowing the startup to increase graphite production for companies building lithium-ion-based batteries and accelerate research, said Halo Materials CEO Darren Hau. (source: Albuquerque Journal)

Machina, a leader in advanced manufacturing and robotics, announced it has been awarded a qualification contract from Lockheed Martin in support of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) program. The contract marks the first time an assembly produced in a Machina Factory has advanced to qualification for a defense missile system. The contract is managed under Machina Bellator, Machina’s defense subsidiary. The contract underscores Machina’s growing role as a manufacturing collaborator for critical defense weapons systems, delivering complex metal structures at the speed and scale that modern defense programs demand. (source: Machina)

McLaren Construction has agreed a partnership with FieldAI, an international leader in physical AI, to bring general-purpose robots to its UK construction sites. Under the partnership, McLaren will deploy autonomous quadruped robots, initially to capture 360° site imagery, generate point cloud data and support progress verification, model-to-site deviation analysis, safety compliance patrols and quality assurance. The range of tasks will grow over time, adding value to the robots already on site with each new capability. (source: McLaren Construction)

Dassault Aviation and Harmattan AI have successfully demonstrated an in-flight collaborative engagement between a Rafale F4 and an unmanned aerial system equipped with NAMIB, a new electronic warfare payload jointly developed by both companies. This milestone is part of the strategic partnership between Dassault Aviation and Harmattan AI and contributes to defining the future of collaborative air combat. (source: LinkedIn)

WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

In his latest Substack, CX2’s Nathan Mintz argues that modern military advantage is shifting away from building a few maximally-optimized weapons toward the ability to mass-produce "good enough" systems (think cheap drones and interceptors) at scale, because in wars of attrition like Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Iran-Israel, whoever can replace their losses fastest wins.

Arcturus founder and CEO, Amir Mashal, takes us through the journey that led him to form Arcturus.

Nox Metals’ Zane Hengsperger shares his playbook for bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.

Steel industrialist Will Alverson gives his take on how Wisconsin is hurting its manufacturing industry: “If WI does not position itself as a friendly place for investment, then who will invest in keeping our capacity online?”

Lower Carbon Capital breaks down why it invested in Senra Systems. This sentence is a big clue: “The companies that will define the next era of American manufacturing are the ones building systems that scale production with the workforce we have now.”

HOW I CAN HELP YOU

Here are 3* ways I can help when the time is right:

1. Find a new home for your growing business. You're scaling fast, and you don't have time to become a CRE expert. I do this every day.

2. Sublease your space. Outgrown your office, but don't want to pay two rents? I'll help you find a subtenant.

3. Negotiate your lease renewal. Want to make sure you’re getting a fair deal from your Landlord? In my experience, you can never be too sure. Start 12 months out, so you're not scrambling at the last minute.

Strong references available. Let's talk.

*Not an exhaustive list 💪

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 Vice President
CA DRE License #02080746
424.241.4795 | [email protected] 
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