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🔦 SpotlightHappy Friday, Los Angeles. Castelion has spent the past four years trying to prove that hypersonic missiles do not need to take decades to develop or cost so much that the military can only afford a limited supply.Now comes the harder part: producing them at scale.The Torrance-based defense startup raised a $1B Series C at a $13B valuation. The financing includes $800M in equity and a $250M revolving credit facility, making it one of the largest recent raises for an LA defense technology company.JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz and Carlyle co-led the round. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lavrock Ventures, Altimeter, General Catalyst, T. Rowe Price and LA-based Interlagos Capital also participated.Castelion will use the capital to ramp production of Blackbeard, its low-cost hypersonic strike missile, while developing a longer-range precision weapon and new defensive systems. Hundreds of millions of dollars will go toward expanding manufacturing at Project Ranger, the company’s 1,000-acre production campus in New Mexico. Image Source: Castelion Blackbeard was designed in California, will be built in New Mexico and is expected to enter service in 2027. Castelion says it has already secured more than $500M in U.S. military contracts over the past 18 months and moved the missile from a clean-sheet concept to an official program in fewer than four years.That timeline is central to Castelion’s pitch. Traditional defense programs are often associated with long development cycles, limited production runs and eye-watering costs. Castelion is applying the rapid testing and vertically integrated manufacturing approach popularized by commercial space companies to weapons production.But a $13B valuation changes the standard. Castelion is no longer being judged as a promising startup with an impressive prototype. It is being funded like a company expected to become a major part of the American defense industrial base.The question is no longer whether a startup can build a hypersonic missile. It is whether one can manufacture thousands of them without losing the speed, discipline and cost advantages that made it disruptive in the first place.For LA’s defense ecosystem, that shift matters. The region has become home to a growing number of companies promising to modernize how America builds critical hardware. Castelion now has the capital, contracts and facilities to show what happens when that promise reaches the factory floor.The next test will not be in a pitch deck. It will be in production.More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.🤝 Venture DealsLA CompaniesLong Beach based Ampaire raised a $19M Series B led by DiamondStream Partners, with strategic participation from Alaska Star Ventures and IAGi Ventures, bringing its total funding to $68M. The hybrid-electric aviation company will use the capital to expand flight operations, produce additional Eco Caravan aircraft, advance regulatory certification and scale its manufacturing capabilities. - learn moreLA Venture FundsSUM Ventures participated in AssistMe’s €6.5M funding round, which was led by CRB Health Tech and Vorwerk Ventures and included several returning investors. The German care technology company will use the capital to expand across Europe, prepare for a U.S. launch and further develop alea, its digital platform for supporting caregivers and improving nursing-home operations. - learn moreCIV led Hypercubic’s $5.3M seed round, with participation from Y Combinator, Afore Capital, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Ventures and several angel investors. The San Francisco startup will use the capital to develop AI agents that can analyze, document and rewrite decades-old COBOL systems, helping enterprises modernize critical mainframe software faster and with less risk. - learn morePlus Capital participated in Wispr Flow’s $280M Series B, led by Menlo Ventures and joined by existing and new investors, valuing the AI voice company at $2B. The funding brings Wispr’s total capital raised to $361M and will support its expansion beyond dictation into meeting tools and proprietary speech technology, including its new Canto model. - learn moreAlexandria Venture Investments participated in Leal Therapeutics’ $30M Series A extension alongside new investor Eli Lilly and returning backers including OrbiMed, Newpath Partners and SV Health Investors’ Dementia Discovery Fund. The biotech company will use the funding to advance clinical trials of LTX-001 for schizophrenia and LTX-002 for ALS, with initial schizophrenia trial data expected by year-end. - learn moreBroadLight Capital participated in Higgsfield’s $400M Series B, led by DST Global and joined by investors including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Smash Capital, Fifth Wall and Intel Capital. The AI video and image platform, now valued at $5.4B with $700M in annualized revenue, will use the funding for R&D, global infrastructure, AI hiring and international expansion. - learn moreDownload the dot.LA App
Happy Friday, LA.
The largest checks in tech are increasingly going toward companies trying to build their way out of America’s biggest physical constraints.
This week, two Los Angeles startups raised a combined $2.37 billion in equity to tackle two particularly urgent ones: how the country manufactures critical hardware and where it will find enough electricity to power the AI era.
Torrance-based Hadrian is building highly automated factories for defense and aerospace. El Segundo’s Valar Atomics wants to manufacture nuclear reactors at scale. Different industries, same underlying bet: the next generation of technology will depend on our ability to produce physical infrastructure much faster than we do today.
Hadrian raised $1.37 billion in Series D funding, bringing its valuation to $7.87 billion. The company plans to use the capital to open new factories, expand research and development, and increase its capacity to produce critical defense, aerospace and industrial systems.
Hadrian’s pitch is straightforward, if wildly ambitious: America needs to relearn how to build things and build them quickly.
Its factories combine skilled workers with AI, robotics and proprietary software to manufacture precision components and, increasingly, complete mission-critical systems. Its customers include defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and RTX, along with newer players like Anduril.
The company has come a long way from simply making aerospace parts. Hadrian is positioning itself as a piece of America’s industrial infrastructure, offering manufacturers a way to rapidly scale domestic production at a time when wars abroad, strained supply chains and growing defense demands have made the country’s manufacturing gaps increasingly difficult to ignore.
Investors are clearly buying the argument. The new round comes just over a year after Hadrian raised $260 million, suggesting that “reindustrialization” has officially graduated from venture capital buzzword to billion-dollar investment thesis.
Meanwhile, roughly 15 miles away in El Segundo, Valar Atomics is moving even faster than its enormous ambitions suggested.
When we last wrote about Valar, the company was reportedly raising $450 million at a $2 billion valuation and racing to prove that nuclear energy could move on AI’s timetable. Now, it has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, secured an additional $200 million credit facility and reportedly reached a $6 billion valuation.
Valar is developing standardized, factory-built nuclear power plants designed to avoid the enormous costs and decades-long construction timelines associated with traditional nuclear projects. Its goal is not merely to build a working reactor, but to eventually manufacture fleets of them.
That ambition also sounds considerably less theoretical than it did when we first covered the company. In June, Valar’s Ward 250 reactor achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Just one week later, the company demonstrated the reactor generating electricity to power an Nvidia Blackwell system. Valar now says the new funding will help it move from proving its technology works to producing reactors at scale.
The timing is no coincidence. AI’s enormous appetite for electricity is forcing the tech industry to confront a basic reality: the cloud still has to plug into something. Training models and operating massive data centers will require far more reliable power, and nuclear energy is rapidly becoming one of Silicon Valley’s favorite answers.
Hadrian and Valar may be solving different problems, but their unusually large rounds point to the same shift. AI can design, predict and automate, but it cannot manufacture a missile component or generate a megawatt of electricity on its own. That requires factories, energy systems, supply chains and a great deal of capital.
For years, venture-backed companies competed to build the software layer. Now, some of the biggest bets are being placed on the infrastructure underneath it.
The future may run on AI. But first, someone has to build what keeps it running.
More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.
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| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Castelion raises $1bn Series C for hypersonic defence | 0 | 11.38 | 24-08-2026 |
| 2 | Американский стартап Castelion получил 1 млрд долларов на гиперзвуковые ракеты | 0 | 8.74 | 20-08-2026 |
| 3 | WSJ: стартап США Castelion привлёк более $1 млрд на гиперзвуковые ракеты | 0 | 10.98 | 20-08-2026 |
| 4 | Американский стартап смог привлечь более $1 млрд на гиперзвуковые ракеты | 0 | 10.99 | 20-08-2026 |
| 5 | Heaviside Raises $28M for Autonomous Precision Munitions | 0 | 9.6 | 15-05-2026 |
| 6 | Two LA Startups Raised $2.37B to Build What AI Needs | 0 | 9.18 | 07-08-2026 |
| 7 | Apex Hits $2.3B Valuation as Satellite Demand Grows | 0 | 10.21 | 05-06-2026 |
| 8 | Hadrian Raises $1.4 Billion To Cache Firepower Amid Surging DoD Demand For Weapons Manufacturing | 0 | 24.06 | 06-08-2026 |
| 9 | From Rocket Motors to Consumer AI | 0 | 6.79 | 22-05-2026 |
| 10 | FT сообщила о переходе США к конвейерной сборке ракет | 0 | 7 | 28-06-2026 |