Here's my hardtech weekly roundup!
U.S. HARDTECH:
- Covenant came out of stealth with Anthem, a Tomahawk-class missile carrying over 200 kilograms, and disclosed $250 million raised from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph, and Lightspeed. It's pitched at mid-six figures a round against roughly $5 million for a Tomahawk, with a Dallas plant plus lines in Germany and Israel.
- Mach Industries added $600 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, taking total raised past $1 billion, with Ribbit, Bedrock, and Sequoia all doubling down. The money goes to manufacturing capacity across strike drones, glide munitions, and low-cost interceptors.
- Positron AI raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation for inference chips built on commodity LPDDR5X memory rather than HBM, the high-bandwidth memory that's the tightest constraint in AI hardware right now. NEA, Atreides, and Valor led, and its Atlas system is already deployed.
- Stoke Space closed the first $1 billion of a Series E co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, putting it at $2.3 billion raised. It's building Nova, a rocket meant to be reusable all the way up including the second stage, with a hydrogen-cooled metal heat shield rated for 100 flights.
- L3Harris took $4.7 billion from Lockheed Martin to supply propulsion for the PAC-3, the interceptor at the heart of Patriot that kills by hitting rather than exploding. It covers seven-plus years of rocket motors, with two new plants going up in Camden, Arkansas.
- USA Rare Earth broke ground on a $1.2 billion magnet plant in Blacksburg, South Carolina, targeting 6,400 tonnes a year of sintered neodymium magnets plus 5,000 tonnes of metal and alloy. Those magnets go into everything from fighter jets to submarines, and China makes almost all of them today.
- Nitradyn won $581 million from the Pentagon for an explosives plant in Graham, Kentucky making about 8 million pounds a year of IMX-104. That's the insensitive-munitions fill for artillery and mortar rounds, meaning it won't detonate if shot or dropped, and Nitradyn is a joint venture that only formed last year.
- GrayMatter Robotics laid out a deal with HII worth up to $900 million over seven years to automate Navy shipbuilding, with robots doing the cutting, welding, grinding, blasting, and coating. It's also building a fully autonomous greenfield shipyard with Path Robotics, then replicating the model at existing yards.
- Antares won $161 million from the Air Force to demonstrate a nuclear reactor in space, which the company calls the largest current Department of War award in space nuclear power. It covers a ground test of its R1-S heat pipe reactor, integration onto a spacecraft, and eventually powering a real asset in orbit.
- The Defense Innovation Unit will start sponsoring facility clearances so startups can sit in on classified requirements talks before bidding. A facility clearance is the company-level approval you need to touch classified work at all, and processing time for venture-backed firms is already down five or six fold.
ALLIED HARDTECH:
- The UK put £7.8 billion behind a new space strategy through 2030, with more than £3 billion of it military. The largest lines are £2.8 billion for satellite communications including the SKYNET military network and £880 million for tracking what's happening in orbit.
- The Exploration Company raised a $450 million Series C led by Bessemer, Atomico, and EQT's Scaleup Europe fund, taking it to about $680 million. The French-German company builds Nyx, a reusable capsule for hauling cargo to and from orbit, plus a methane engine for future heavy launchers.
- Hanwha Aerospace landed a €411.8 million Croatian order for 18 Chunmoo rocket launchers plus ammunition carriers and guided rockets reaching about 300 kilometers. Poland's WB Group supplies the battle management software, and deliveries run through 2030.
That's the week. Thanks for following!