- Amca has raised a $300M Series B led by Caffeinated Capital, pushing its valuation beyond $1B just 18 months after launch.
- The startup is building an integrated aerospace and defence manufacturing platform that combines engineering, testing, documentation, and certified production into one system.
- Its RAPID platform is already supporting production for major programmes, including the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, while helping cut development timelines by over 67%.
Eighteen months after launch, Amca has a unicorn valuation, a $300 million war chest, and a pointed argument: that America’s defence supply chain is not just struggling, it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
The El Segundo, California-based startup has closed a $300 million Series B led by Caffeinated Capital, with Lightspeed Venture Partners joining existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Construct Capital, and House Capital. The round pushes Amca’s valuation beyond $1 billion, which the company claims makes it one of the fastest aerospace and defence startups to reach unicorn status.
The urgency behind the raise is real. America’s aerospace and defence industry is contending with ageing factories, acute labour shortages, and geopolitical pressures that are slowing the production of critical systems at precisely the moment governments are demanding faster military readiness. The Pentagon has said as much publicly. But identifying the problem and solving it are two different things, and most of the industry has chosen to work around the bottlenecks rather than confront them.
Amca was founded to confront them. Co-founder Jai Malik brings a background in aerospace and defence investment and entrepreneurship; co-founder Eli Giovanetti was previously a senior production and engineering leader at SpaceX. Together, they have focused the company on the components that sit between standardised parts and full systems: sensors, power units, flight-control computers. The unglamorous but mission-critical hardware that keeps aircraft flying and defence programmes on schedule.
At the centre of Amca’s approach is RAPID, a vertically integrated product development platform that collapses the traditional sequence of design, prototyping, testing, and certified manufacturing into a single connected workflow. The company says RAPID cuts development timelines by more than 67% compared to conventional industry processes. That is not a theoretical figure; the platform is already supporting production for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the most advanced fighter jet in the US arsenal, alongside commercial aviation programmes.
The incumbents, Amca is challenging, legacy suppliers to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, were not built for speed. They were built for a defence procurement era defined by long timelines, stable budgets, and predictable demand. That era is over. Supply chain failures have become a strategic liability, and the gap between what modern defence programmes require and what traditional manufacturers can deliver has grown into a crisis the industry can no longer paper over.
Amca already operates factories across California, Iowa, and New York. The new capital will fund additional factory acquisitions across the US, extend RAPID throughout its manufacturing network, and accelerate production of the components on which America’s most critical defence systems depend.
Eighteen months in, the valuation is notable. But the harder proof is still ahead.
