American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #5

Castelion raised $1B at a $13B valuation, $800M in equity plus a $250M credit facility, co-led by JPMorgan's Strategic Investment Group, a16z, and Carlyle. It scales Blackbeard, the low-cost hypersonic strike missile, at Project Ranger, a 1k-acre campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico. (PR Newswire)

Two munitions megadeals landed in the same week. Raytheon took $22.9B over seven years to move Tomahawk production from about 60 missiles a year to more than 1,000, and Lockheed took $35B over seven years for THAAD. AEI's math says that at a max rate of 96 interceptors a year, filling the THAAD requirement still takes 27 years. (Defense News, Defense One)

Starcloud raised a $250M extension to its March Series A at a $2.3B valuation, led by Manhattan West Ventures with Nvidia in for $25M. The 25-person company already runs H100s in orbit. CEO Philip Johnston says the binding constraint is now launch: Falcon 9 winds down in 2028, and nothing else flies at cadence yet. (TechCrunch)

Muon Space raised $250M at a $1.5B valuation, led by Eclipse with Google and Salesforce Ventures in. The money expands its San Jose plant toward 500 satellites a year by 2027, with automated assembly lines phasing in through late 2026. Eleven on orbit, 50-plus manifested. (SatNews)

Silent Ventures closed an $85M Fund II anchored by Brian Singerman and Lee Linden's GPx. Jackson Moses runs it solo and writes the first check into pre-seed defense, often the only one. The portfolio already holds Saronic, Castelion, Hadrian, Firestorm, CHAOS, and Impulse, and Fund I plus affiliates produced 14 unicorns. (Tectonic Defense)

Urenco broke ground on a major expansion at its enrichment plant in Eunice, New Mexico, adding 2.1M SWU and taking total site investment past $8B from over $5B. First cascades produce in 2032, with more going in through 2036. Built entirely on customer contracts, no public money. (World Nuclear News)

Radiant trucked its Kaleidos microreactor 1k miles from El Segundo to Idaho National Lab, where it runs five test phases ending with 150 straight hours at full power with nobody minding it. It's the production design for the Oak Ridge factory, and the first unit goes to Buckley Space Force Base in 2028. (World Nuclear News)

NextEra picked up $3.3B from Commerce and the Japanese government toward 10 GW of new gas generation in Texas and Pennsylvania. The anchor is a $17B, 4.3 GW project in the Mon Valley, with first power as early as end of 2028. (DataCenterDynamics)

The Navy's Rapid Capabilities Office and DIU put $50M into Shield AI's X-BAT, the vertical-takeoff autonomous fighter, at an estimated $27M a copy. The Air Force passed for now, citing budget pressure from F-47, B-21, Sentinel, F-35, and KC-46. (Air & Space Forces Magazine)

The White House rewrote the Critical and Emerging Technologies list for the first time since February 2024, cutting it from 18 categories to 14. Out: data centers, batteries, grid integration, gas turbine engines, and AR. In: post-quantum cryptography, integrated photonics, and high-entropy alloys. That list drives export controls, CFIUS screening, and R&D budget priorities. (Tom's Hardware)

South Korea: Hanwha won the Army's Mobile Tactical Cannon award, $100.3M up front and $262.9M cumulative, for six wheeled K9 howitzer prototypes with an option for 12 more. It beat American Rheinmetall, BAE, General Dynamics, and Elbit, and is standing up an integration site in Opelika, Alabama. (TWZ)

Switzerland: Gravis Robotics raised $200M led by SoftBank, which it says is the largest round ever in construction robotics. The ETH Zurich spinout sells a retrofit kit that makes existing Caterpillar, Deere, and JCB excavators autonomous. (The Robot Report)

Germany and Japan: Helsing brought in Rakuten to broker a sale of its drones to Japan's Ground Self-Defense Forces, with the HX-2 strike drone in field testing through September. Rakuten did the same thing for Ukraine's Swarmer. (Defense News)

UK: Britain will field at least 12 dual-capable F-35As at RAF Marham for NATO's nuclear mission, putting the RAF back in a nuclear role for the first time since the WE177 was retired in 1998. (Defence Industry Europe)