- Castelion raised $1B in Series C funding at a $13B valuation.
- JPMorganChase, Andreessen Horowitz, and Carlyle co-led the $800M equity round.
- The startup has $500M in military contracts and targets 2027 for Blackbeard.
Castelion, a Torrance, California-based company, has closed a $1 billion Series C, split between $800 million in equity and a $250 million revolving credit facility, bringing its total valuation to $13 billion.
JPMorgan Chase’s Strategic Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and funds managed by Carlyle co-led the equity round, joined by returning backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lavrock Ventures, Altimeter, General Catalyst, and Interlagos, as well as new investor T. Rowe Price Associates.
“Deterrence depends on unapologetic American strength: highly capable weapon systems that adversaries fear, produced in quantities they can’t imagine, at a price taxpayers can afford. There’s a manufacturing renaissance underway, and this round turbocharges American production of Blackbeard,” said Bryon Hargis, Castelion’s co-founder and chief executive.
Why the Pentagon is paying up
The round lands as Washington worries it has fallen behind China on hypersonic weapons, missiles that fly above Mach 5 and manoeuvre enough to dodge existing air defences.
Castelion has booked more than $500 million in U.S. military contracts over 18 months and has taken Blackbeard from a blank sheet to a Pentagon programme of record in under four years, with fielding targeted for 2027.
“Castelion is helping to address a critical national security challenge by bringing greater speed, agility, and manufacturing capacity to the development of next-generation defence technologies,” said Todd Combs, who heads the Strategic Investment Group for JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative.
Carlyle’s Aaron Hurwitz, a managing director on the firm’s aerospace, defence, and government team, put it more bluntly: “We view Castelion as a critical asset to national security, advancing next-gen technology that strengthens America’s defence industrial base.”
From three SpaceX engineers to a 1,000-acre factory
Hargis founded Castelion in 2022 with Sean Pitt and Andrew Kreitz, all SpaceX executives, saying that commercial manufacturing discipline could out-produce primes like Lockheed Martin and RTX rather than out-engineer them.
For example, Castelion’s framework agreement with the Department of War targets a minimum of 500 Blackbeard missiles per year once testing wraps up, a production rate closer to a factory line than a defence contractor’s workshop.
The company’s funding history reads like a steady escalation of conviction. Lavrock Ventures led a $5.4 million pre-seed round in April 2023, followed by Lavrock and Andreessen Horowitz backing a $14.2 million seed round later that year. Lightspeed then led a $70 million Series A alongside $30 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank in January 2025, before Altimeter and Lightspeed co-led a $350 million Series B in December 2025. Including this round’s equity but excluding the new revolver, Castelion’s total funding is roughly $1.27 billion.
“Lightspeed led Castelion’s Series A before a complete system had flown. Three rounds later, the company is mixing its own propellant in New Mexico and shipping hardware to the services. Very few teams convert capital into physical capability at that ratio, which is why we have invested in every round since,” said Ravi Mhatre, co-founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Lavrock’s Alex Poulin, a partner at the firm, has watched the same arc from even earlier: “We backed Castelion at pre-seed, when this was still just an idea, and the production demand it’s generating today is the clearest signal we’ve ever seen. In under four years, Castelion has gone from clean sheet to program of record, one of the fastest ramps in the sector.”
Altimeter’s Erik Kriessmann calls the round proof of concept as much proof of capital: “They’ve turned ambitious promises into flight-tested hardware and real production capacity for critical national security priorities.”
Emma Norchet of new investor T. Rowe Price Associates pointed to something rarer than technology: “The company has contracts in hand, a manufacturing campus built with its own capital, and unit economics that improve with scale — truly unique characteristics for a company before it reaches the public markets.”
General Catalyst’s Alexa Liautaud framed the bet in similarly stark terms: “We believe credible deterrence will be won by companies that manufacture at the speed of the threat, build on frontier technology, and attract exceptional talent.”
Interlagos chairman Tom Ochinero went further still: “They’re building the capabilities to produce thousands of hypersonic weapons a year, something the U.S. has never seen before.”
The new capital will expand manufacturing at Project Ranger, Castelion’s 1,000-acre campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico, where the company has already committed more than $250 million in private infrastructure spending and now plans hundreds of millions more. Beyond scaling Blackbeard, Castelion is accelerating the development of a longer-range precision strike weapon built on the same production techniques and developing a separate line of lower-cost air and missile defence systems.
A crowded, capital-flush battlefield
Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund, which co-led this round, has also backed Anduril and Hadrian, giving Castelion company among the firm’s highest-conviction defence bets.
Katherine Boyle, general partner at the firm, said: “We backed Castelion when it was a small team that wanted to build what the Department of War most needed faster and cheaper than the experts thought possible. Four years later, there is a factory in New Mexico and a production agreement with the Department of War.”
Castelion isn’t alone in raising outsized defence rounds this year: Hermeus hit a $1 billion valuation in April, and Quantum Systems raised $1.2 billion in July. The hypersonic weapons market alone is forecast to grow from $8.64 billion in 2026 at a 10.5% compound annual rate, according to The Business Research Company.
Whether Castelion can deliver 500 missiles a year at a price the Pentagon keeps paying is the question its $13 billion valuation now has to answer. Defence primes have promised that kind of scale for decades without hitting it.
