If this is the week before Farnborough, we can’t possibly imagine what next week is going to be like.
This morning, UK-based (and fairly sneaky) aerospace tech company Greenjets announced that it’s raised a $40M Series A led by Blossom Capital with participation from the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and existing investors including Tanglin Ventures and NSFO Family Office.
- The raise comes just a few days after the UK MoD tapped Greenjets to develop low-cost interceptors for the UK, Poland, France, Italy, and Germany under the UK’s LEAP (Low-cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms) program.
Greenjets CEO Anmol Manohar told Tectonic that the funding will go into three areas:
- Production scale-up. The company is “looking to increase [its] production capacity by roughly 8x” from hundreds of units a month to thousands.
- R&D to “expand their product portfolio” (we’ll get to that in a sec).
- International expansion. They’re looking “beyond the UK and NATO at the US, the Middle East, and India,” Manohar said.
They’re also planning to flex those dual-use muscles.
“We are a company that’s looking at the entire ecosystem, not just defense drones, but we want to power all forms of mobility in the future—civilian applications like air taxis, delivery drones, and so on,” he said. “As a technology stack, we have much wider applications than the immediate needs in the defense space today.”
Under the radar: Greenjets is one of those companies that you may not have heard of, but is kind of already on a speed run.
- The company was founded by Manohar—a former Rolls-Royce aerospace engineer—and Guido Monterzino, an aerospace engineer with a PhD in UAV design, back in 2022.
- They’re headquartered in London, with operations in New York and Hyderabad, per their site. They’re also planning to open up a big ol’ 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Milton Keynes (in the UK).
- At the end of last year, they had just 60 employees—now they’re up to 160, and plan to get to 250 with this new round.
- Before this new pile of cash, they’d raised about $8M in funding—most recently a $7M seed in September 2024.
Zoom zoom: Manohar emphasized that “at the heart of the company is a proprietary propulsion technology stack,” with hardware built around it.
“What makes our propulsion system special is that it is able to provide the same performance as a jet engine, but with the operational simplicity and cost benefits of an electric system,” he said.
All in the family: Here’s what those engines power.
- Hemlock: A family of high-speed cUAS systems. This has been the company’s most successful vertical.
- Sycamore: A family of low-noise surveillance drones.
- Turbofan: A family of long-range drones.
And these aren’t just pie-in-the-sky ideas or renders—while that UK low-cost interceptor contract was the only one Manohar could talk about, he said that both Hemlock and Sycamore systems are already deployed and being used. Per the company, they’re “under contract across multiple UK and international programmes.”
Turbofan, for its part, will be entering the market in the “latter half of this year.”
Share the love: Their strategy isn’t just about their own platforms—Manohar and Greenjets plan to sell the propulsion system to the rest of the industry, as well.
“We are a critical part of the supply chain for next-generation autonomous systems. We are here to support both the neo-primes and the primes,” he said. “That is where the NATO Innovation Fund and NSSIF have come in. [They believe] that this technology is what needs to be developed to support pretty much all autonomous systems to come over the next few years.”