May's Space Dirt 🚀 (mid-month)

Anduril continues its march through the alphabet, raising a round H. Lots of interesting companies are emerging from stealth, plus an Aetherflux pivot and rebrand (I like the new version!). And how not to screw up your next lease. All that and a whole lot more.

Also, check out my new table of contents. If you’re on your phone, click on a link and jump to the section.

Table of Contents

• REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

• STEALTH NO MORE

• NOTABLE FUNDINGS

• AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

• WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

• HOW I CAN HELP YOU

REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

Durin leased 11,000 SF at 145 Kansas Street, El Segundo, CA. (source: Me!)

Auron Solutions has moved its HQ to Los Angeles, CA. (source: LinkedIn)

Astro acquired a 20,000 SF facility in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles , 430 Colyton St, Los Angeles, CA. (source: LinkedIn)

Hidden Level unveiled its new anechoic chamber at its advanced manufacturing campus in Syracuse, NY. The chamber provides a fully shielded environment that blocks external electromagnetic interference and absorbs internal reflections, enabling controlled, repeatable, and fully automated system-level testing of our RF sensing systems at production scale. Hidden Level now has four facilities in Syracuse. (source: LinkedIn)

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has formally accepted for review Radiant’s 10 CFR Part 70 license application for its R-50 Production Facility in Tennessee. The NRC will review the application on an expedited timeline with a goal of completing its work within eight months, approximately 55% faster than the standard schedule for this type of review. This marks a major regulatory milestone and is a first for the microreactor industry, and a key indicator that America is on the cusp of an energy revolution. (source: Radiant)

1X’s NEO Factory in Hayward, CA, has now begun full-scale production, bringing end-to-end manufacturing of NEO, the home robot, under one roof. Spanning 58,000 SF and employing over 200 team members, 1X designs and builds every critical component in-house– motors, batteries, transmissions, sensors, structures, and final assembly– enabling faster iteration, superior safety, and true American scale. With the first robots already coming off the line and consumer shipments planned for 2026, this is the critical milestone that turns the vision of abundant, general-purpose home robots into reality.  (source: YouTube)

Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company Zoox leased a 10.2-acre site at 25555 Clawiter Road in Hayward, CA, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The property spans 34,000 square feet and will function as a logistics and staging hub for finished vehicles built across the street at Zoox’s manufacturing plant. (source: The Real Deal)

Odin Space, a British startup focused on mapping and analyzing sub-centimeter orbital debris, announced plans to establish its first U.S. office in Los Angeles. “We are expanding in the United States because that is where the demand has moved fastest, and where the strategic stakes of attribution are highest.”(source: Copernical)

STEALTH NO MORE

Ciridae raised a $20M seed led by Accel, with participation from a16z, General Catalyst, Sunflower, and Backcountry. The company is co-founded by Jack Soslow and his co-founder, Jack Weissenberger, who met through their then-girlfriends — now wives. Soslow's co-founder spent years building enterprise AI at Apple and Tenyx. Soslow was at a16z, watching the same businesses try to adopt it and fail. They compared notes and decided to build something different. The pitch: the businesses that keep the physical economy running — distributors, construction firms, logistics providers, staffing companies, home services — have the most to gain from AI and are the least equipped to capture it. Most AI transformation efforts treat these businesses as an afterthought. Ciridae embeds directly with them and rebuilds their core operations as AI-native systems, end to end, with one accountable partner. The platform is designed to move fast: transformation in weeks, not years. In 2025, before raising the seed, the company hit high-seven figures in revenue, grew profitably, and worked with governments representing trillions in GDP and PE funds with trillions in AUM. (source: Ciridae and X)

Enhanced Radar raised $7M to modernize the infrastructure layer that keeps aircraft separated and skies safe. The round was led by Initialized Capital, with participation from United Airlines, Y Combinator, Decisive Point, and individual operators from aviation, autonomous vehicles, and consumer tech — including Sky Dayton, Tyson Weihs, Adrian Aoun, and Oliver Cameron. The company's argument is direct: the National Airspace System was built for an era that no longer exists. The proliferation of commercial drones, advanced air mobility vehicles, and increasing commercial flight density has outpaced what legacy radar infrastructure was designed to handle. Enhanced Radar is building the next-generation layer to replace it — more reliable, more intelligent, more proactive. The company already has infrastructure deployed at over 80 airports across North America and is expanding its footprint with this raise. Eric Button is the CEO. (source: LinkedIn)

Heaviside Industries emerged from stealth this week with a $28M Series A to accelerate production and delivery of multi-domain autonomous precision munitions for U.S. and allied forces. The round was led by Interlagos, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Flume Ventures, Cantos, Anorak Ventures, former Carlyle MD Frank Finelli, Partners Capital co-founder Paul Dimitruk, and former Dedrone CEO Aaditya Devarakonda. Founded in 2024, the company has been quietly building for over two years, with a team of more than 50 engineers and operators across offices in Los Angeles and Oslo. CEO Phillip Walker says autonomous precision munitions are already in the air and on the water, currently in low-rate production with U.S. special forces, NATO special forces, and conventional forces across multiple allied nations testing and providing feedback. The munitions are designed for hyper-precision in jammed and GPS-denied environments — the operating conditions where most existing systems fail. The Menlo Ventures partner leading the deal described the team as the engineers behind the most successful miniaturized military UAS ever fielded, with a guidance group logging over 100,000 flight hours in contested environments. (source: Tectonic)

Stone Power is building natural gas turbines — and intends to design, fabricate, and deploy them faster and cheaper than any incumbent in the market. The company raised a pre-seed from Boost VC and Forward Deploy (no figure disclosed) and is operating out of Hawthorne. Dylan Morris is the Founder and CEO. The founding team brings decades of experience across power turbines, space hardware, and defense. The core argument: GPU production is scaling faster than power generation, and the existing supply chain for large turbines is the bottleneck. The major OEMs are slow, constrained by complexity, and optimizing for the wrong variables. Stone's approach is to simplify radically at the system level — designing for manufacturability from the first principles, not optimizing components in isolation — and to use an AI-native engineering stack to compress the design-to-production timeline. The company is targeting gigawatt-scale delivery before 2030 on its first product: a large natural gas turbine optimized for total power volume to market. Nuclear, geothermal, heat recovery, and propulsion applications are explicitly on the long-term roadmap, using the same physics kernel and factory infrastructure. (source: Substack and LinkedIn)

Prototyping.io is rebuilding the design-to-manufacturing workflow for mechanical parts from the ground up. The company went through YC's Spring 2026 batch. No funding figure has been disclosed. The workflow they're attacking runs from CAD through design for manufacturability, planning, sourcing, programming, and setup — all the way to manufacturing execution. Today, that chain is largely manual, takes weeks, and produces inconsistent results. Prototyping.io is automating it end-to-end using AI-driven manufacturing intelligence, workflow automation, and physical AI models, with autonomous execution through industrial robotics as the eventual destination. The near-term product: CAD designs turned into high-quality mechanical parts in as fast as one day. They're already working with customers ranging from early-stage hardware startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. Revanth Bodepudi is the Founder and CEO. (source: Y Combinator and LinkedIn)

Loombotic is launching what it calls the world's first quick-turn, high-mix, fully automated wire harness production line — and backing it with YC support. The goal: make wire harnesses as fast and easy to order as PCBs or sheet metal. Customers can already upload a harness design, get an instant quote, and now have those parts produced on Loombotic's automated line. No funding figure has been disclosed. Lucas Crupi is a Co-founder and the CEO. Ethan Breit is a Co-founder and CTO. Wire harnesses are one of the most labor-intensive components in modern hardware. Every vehicle, aircraft, satellite, and piece of industrial equipment has one — often custom, always complex, and almost entirely assembled by hand. The production process hasn't been meaningfully automated, which means lead times are long, costs are high, and scaling production requires scaling headcount. (source: Loombotic and LinkedIn)

Cowboy Space Corporation — pivoting and rebranding from Aetherflux — raised $275M in Series B financing at a $2 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures, with participation from IVP, Blossom Capital, SAIC, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, a16z, NEA, and Interlagos. The rebrand announced alongside the raise signals a significant pivot: the company that started as a space-based solar power venture is now building vertically integrated orbital infrastructure for AI compute. The architecture is the headline. Founder and CEO, Baiju Bhatt, spoke to multiple launch providers to find a path where his company would build only satellites, but couldn't find enough launch capacity to truly scale — so Cowboy is building its own rocket. The upper stage doesn't separate from the payload: it stays in orbit and operates as a one-megawatt data center. Each launch adds compute and power capacity to the Stampede constellation, which harnesses solar energy to run on-orbit GPU clusters. The first satellite launch, targeting a space-to-Earth power beaming demonstration, is scheduled for later this year. A cluster of GPUs for high-performance in-orbit compute follows in 2027. The inaugural rocket launch is planned for late 2028. The team includes engineers from SpaceX, Astranis, NASA, Kuiper, and NVIDIA, and the company is collaborating with NVIDIA on Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules for the orbital compute stack. Founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, the company had previously raised $80M before this round. (source: X)

Inflection Space Systems is building what it calls the most affordable and mass-producible Earth-orbiting satellite in the world — the infrastructure layer for a space economy that doesn't yet exist at the scale it's heading toward. The company targets Earth orbit first, with lunar orbit and beyond on the explicit roadmap. First orbital deployment is planned for 2027. No funding details have been disclosed publicly. Alex Lisso is a Co-founder and CEO. Matthew Hanley is the Co-founder and CTO. The framing they're working from: launch costs are falling, the technology is maturing, but the infrastructure to support the orbital economy at an industrial scale — hundreds of thousands of assets in orbit, supply chains extending to the Moon — hasn't been built. They call this the Infrastructure Imperative, and it's what the company was founded to solve. (source: LinkedIn)

Argos Research raised $1.6M in pre-seed funding to build what it describes as the first neural network architecture capable of true continual learning for physical, real-world environments. The round was led by Paige Craig and Outlander VC, with angel participation from Charlie Songhurst and others. The problem they're attacking: AI has transformed digital work by brute force — throw enough data at an architecture and it generalizes across text, code, images. That approach doesn't work in the physical world. Physical environments are chaotic, constantly changing, and cannot be captured in a static training set. Current approaches, from imitation learning to large-scale data collection, haven't produced the autonomous systems the field has been promising. Argos co-founders — CEO, Hassan Ismail, and CTO Hadi Alsibassi — are building an architecture that lets machines learn continuously as they go, adapting to new conditions in real time rather than requiring retraining. (source: Argos Research and LinkedIn)

Altara raised a $7M seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid2, and angels including Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean and leadership from OpenAI and AMD. The company is building what it calls a scientific intelligence platform for the physical sciences, with early customers already live in semiconductors, batteries, and advanced materials. The problem: scientific R&D in the physical world is bottlenecked by fragmented data and manual workflows. Critical experimental data lives in legacy software systems that researchers describe as "the place data goes to die" — 50-year-old platforms that store data without making it usable. Altara's agents ingest and reason across the complex, multimodal data of physical R&D: semiconductor wafer maps, high-resolution SEM inspection imagery, large-scale instrument time series, scattered spreadsheets, and domain-specific legacy systems. The output is compressed workflows — weeks of analysis brought down to minutes — enabling faster experiment design, faster failure resolution, and a shorter path from discovery to commercialization. Co-founders include Catherine Yeo and CEO Eva Tuecke. (source: TechCrunch and X)

REAL ESTATE CORNER

What's worse than paying rent on empty space?

Paying rent on space the city won't let you use.

Last month, I spoke with a hard tech founder dealing with exactly that. He's been paying rent on 10,200 SF for 3 months, even though his team can't use the space.

He can't build what he needs to in the building right now because his building's "use" was never approved by the city.

This should have been clearly stated in the lease and caught early in the process. But his previous broker missed it. Or, didn't even know about it. Unfortunately, this is a common issue with brokers who don't specialize in hard tech.

If they had worked with the city from the beginning, getting the "use" approved would be pretty straightforward in most cases. Now, this founder is stuck with a space that literally doesn't work for his company's needs.

After working with over 30 hard tech clients, I know that hard tech real estate comes with its own set of rules:

- Different zoning requirements (see "building use")
- Specialized permitting processes
- Power and ventilation needs that standard office brokers don't understand

And, as I mentioned, each city is different.

By the time you realize something went sideways, it's already cost you time, money, and employee confidence. Bad real estate decisions don't always feel bad... until it's too late.

If you're looking for space and need help navigating hard tech real estate landmines, reach out.

I've dealt with all of these issues.

- Erik

PARTNER WITH SPACE DIRT🚀

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If you’re interested in partnering with Space Dirt, email us here to see if we’re a good fit.

NOTABLE FUNDINGS

Anduril announced its Series H Funding round has raised $5B, putting the defense technology company's valuation at $61B. The funding round was led by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. This funding round has doubled the company’s valuation from $30.5 billion in mid-2025. The firm has grown significantly from its $4.7 billion valuation in 2021, driven by AI-powered autonomous systems and surging revenue. (source: Yahoo! Finance)

Founders Fund is investing $624M more into Anduril, bringing its total bet to at least $2.6B as the startup raises at a $60B valuation. (source: The Information)

Geothermal startup Fervo Energy said it hopes to raise up to $1.3B its initial public offering. The company would be valued at up to $6.5B if shares sell at the top of its $21 to $24 price target. That’s more than twice what Fervo had reportedly been seeking earlier this year when it confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC to start the IPO process. The stock will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker FRVO. (source: TechCrunch)

Helsing is reportedly close to raising a new $1.2B round at about an $18B valuation. The round is expected to be led by Dragoneer and co-led by existing Helsing investor Lightspeed, the Financial Times reported. Helsing last raised just under a year ago, in June 2025, in a deal that was led by billionaire Spotify founder Daniel Ek. (source: TechCrunch)

Mind Robotics has closed a $400M funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from an incredible group of partners including Prysm Capital, Meritch, Redpoint, Incharge Capital Partners, SV Angel, A*, Accel, Eclipse, Greenoaks, Andreessen Horowitz, and Garuda Ventures. (source: LinkedIn)

HawkEye 360, a prominent signals intelligence firm based in Herndon, VA, has initiated its initial public offering roadshow, aiming to raise between $384M and $416M. The company is targeting a valuation of approximately $2.4B through this significant financial move. It plans to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "HAWK." The offering consists of 16 million shares of common stock, with an anticipated price range of $24 to $26 per share. Underwriters will also have a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 2.4 million shares. The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who are acting as the lead book-running managers. (source: Startup Researcher)

Havoc, the all-domain collaborative autonomy company, today announced a $100M Series A funding round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to ~$200M since 2024. The round included participation from new investors CCM Capital Markets, Clear Street LLC, Cobalt Capital, Boardman Bay Capital Management, Meet Perry, Mute Ventures, Soren Ventures, SAIC, and JA Green. Existing investors included Outlander VC, Scout VC, B Capital, Lockheed Martin, Taiwania Capital, UP.Partners, and The Veteran Fund, alongside participation from Vanderbilt University’s endowment. (source: Havoc)

Parallel Web Systems, a startup founded by Parag Agrawal, the former chief executive of Twitter, has raised $100M in Series B funding—reflecting increased interest in deploying autonomous artificial-intelligence agents. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, and boosts the Palo Alto, Calif., startup’s valuation to $2B. Existing investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures, also participated. Parallel, which has developed a platform for AI agents search the web, has about 50 employees. Its prior funding round was a $100M Series A last November, which valued the company at $740 M. The startup has raised $230M in total. (source: The Wall St Journal)

Star Catcher, the company building the first power grid in space, announced it has raised $65M in an oversubscribed Series A round. The new investment — led by B Capital and co-led by Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures, the venture arm of Cerberus Capital Management — brings Star Catcher's total capital raised to $88M. Cerberus’ General John W. “Jay” Raymond (Ret.), the first Chief of Space Operations of the United States Space Force, will join Star Catcher's board, along with B Capital General Partner and Global Head of Energy Jeff Johnson and SHIELD Principal David Rothzeid. GreatPoint Ventures, Helena, Oceans Ventures, and MVP Ventures also participated in the round. (source: Star Catcher)

Moment Energy announced it has raised a $40M Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100M. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm. (source: TechCrunch)

Darkhive announced the closing of its $30M Series B funding round. RTX Ventures, the venture capital division of RTX, led the round, joined by new investors Draper Associates and Bison Capital, with continued support from 1011 Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Alamo Angels, and Stellar Ventures. The Series B funding infusion will be used to accelerate production and delivery of its products to customers and expand resources available to innovate in collaboration with the Pentagon. (source: EIN Presswire)

Lunar Outpost announced a $30M Series B led by Industrious Ventures, with participation from Type One Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Reliable Equity, Promus Ventures, Endeavor, and others, to accelerate the critical industrial mobility layer required for a Moon Base. (source: LinkedIn)

Magrathea Metals raised a $24M Series A. The Series A was co-led by Resource Technology Capital and Balerion Space Ventures, with Richard Tite and Phil Scully backing Magrathea at a moment when magnesium is becoming less of a commodity story and more of an industrial capacity story. (source: LinkedIn)

Scout Space, a leader in space domain awareness (SDA) sensors and software, announced it has raised up to $18M in Series A funding, led by Washington Harbour Partners. The round also includes participation from Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), Noblis Ventures, Decisive Point, Fusion Fund, and other existing investors. The new capital will support upcoming mission execution and the expansion of Scout's manufacturing capabilities, including the buildout of a new 2,600 SF facility in Northern Virginia. (source: Yahoo! Finance)

Surgical precision access and visualization platform Illuminant has raised an $8.4M seed round, led by Wing 2 Wing Ventures. The Los Angeles-based startup has taken a unique approach to fundraising: The company has additional venture backers (like Elderberry Ventures and Soma Capital), but about half of that $8.4 million is grant funding from federal institutions like the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute on Aging. (source: Yahoo! Finance) 

AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

York Space Systems plans to acquire satellite communications terminal provider All.Space in a deal valued at about $355M, expanding the company’s reach beyond spacecraft manufacturing into user equipment and network connectivity. The Denver-based satellite maker said the acquisition, if approved, will make All.Space a wholly owned subsidiary. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter. “With this acquisition, York is creating a complete communications ecosystem that operates in contested environments across commercial and government networks,” Chief Executive Dirk Wallinger said. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in the United Kingdom, All.Space has operations in Europe and the United States. The company makes multi-orbit, multi-band communications terminals designed to connect across low, medium and geostationary Earth orbits. According to a regulatory filing, the total purchase price includes $155 million in cash and up to 5.9 million shares of York stock. The deal is being structured as a two-step merger through subsidiaries, after which All.Space would become part of York. (source: SpaceNews)

Firestorm announced that it has secured a $30M APFIT contract (boostable to $50M) to deliver drones and the containerized microfactories that print them to the Indo-Pacific. So far, about $26M has been obligated across 5 task orders, according to the company. (source: Tectonic)

Rocket Lab awarded a $30M multi-launch contract to Anduril for HASTE hypersonic rocket launches. (source: X)

Saildrone won a $15.5M contract with the US Coast Guard to deploy 16 Saildrone Voyager vessels in the Great Lakes and off the US Northeast coast. (source: X)

Biosphere has been awarded a $9M U.S. Army contract to develop field-deployable biomanufacturing systems capable of producing nutritious, ready-to-eat food from air, water, and energy in remote or contested environments. (source: Biosphere)

Nominal has acquired robotics and engineering AI startup Fid Labs. Nominal's first strategic acquisition brings AI-native hardware agents to the platform; Fid Labs founder Adam Wolnikowski joins as AI Product Lead. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. (source: Nominal)

Varda announced a new collaboration with United Therapeutics Corporation to explore the use of microgravity to develop improved treatments for rare lung disease. As part of the agreement, Varda and United Therapeutics will use microgravity’s influence on the structure and crystallization properties of therapeutic compounds in order to improve their stability and delivery. (source: Ars Technica)

Croatian drone company Orqa and defense contractor By Light announced the founding of Orqa U.S. LLC, an independent, U.S.-owned venture established to deliver fully compliant, American-made unmanned aerial systems to the U.S. military and government at scale. Orqa U.S. is headquartered in Oakland, CA, with full-rate production operations based at By Light’s 180,000-square-foot Defense Industrial Base manufacturing facility in Port Orange, FL. The entity will meet all National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), American Security Drone Act (ASDA), and other regulatory requirements, with a commitment to full U.S. onshoring. (source: GlobeNewswire)

Anduril signs an agreement with the Department of War to deliver 1000+ missiles per year. (source: X)

K2 Space announced that it is partnering with Anduril on the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense program. K2 will be providing its Mega-class satellites to host Space-Based Interceptors. (source: X)

Isembard has entered a manufacturing partnership with Dexory to produce components for autonomous warehouse robots and expand production capacity across the UK and United States. The agreement will see Isembard manufacture parts for Dexory’s robotic systems at facilities in London, Exeter, and Gosport, alongside sites in Texas and Missouri. (source: The Engineer)

WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

💡 If you woke up wanting to learn more about Terraform Industries and its Founder, Casey Handmer, read this from Core Memory.

🇺🇸 Cantos’ Grant Gregory announces and takes us through the launch of his State of Adventure Capital, an ongoing series on the progress and innovation in the physical world.

🔖 Neal Bloom, Founder of Rising Tide Partners, unveiled his 2026 San Diego Hardtech 50.

🤖 CX2’s Nathan Mintz’s latest Substack, Robots are Dumb, takes a look at sixty years of the Army trying and failing to build unified command and control, and why the mass proliferation of autonomous systems on the battlefield may be the forcing function that finally makes it happen.

🔥 Cambium is redefining what high-temperature composites can be. Here’s how.

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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