“If AI is to be the brains of America’s tech supremacy, Gundo hopes to provide the muscle, the energy and the firepower,” The Economist recently wrote. “The harder it is to build, the better.”
Looks like we can add super high-tech materials and composites to the list of ambitious Gundo exports, especially after El Segundo, California-based advanced materials startup Cambium announced a $100M Series B led by 8VC, right on the heels of a major composite manufacturing acquisition.
Material madness: If some companies are making the defense sector’s picks and shovels, Cambium is looking to reinvent the foundational materials those tools are made out of. The company, which was incubated by 8VC’s accelerator, uses AI and advanced computing to design and produce brand-new monomers and polymers for the aerospace and defense sector.
Cambium has three main focal points (so far):
- Thermal protection: Cambium has developed a phthalonitrile-based resin system called ApexShield 1000 that reduces carbon-carbon fabrication time for hypersonic parts like glide bodies, rocket nozzles, and other critical components by up to 80 percent compared to legacy hypersonic-grade thermal protection parts.
- High-temperature structural materials: Cambium is developing high-performance polymers meant to increase durability and efficiency in extreme temperatures. They received a DARPA contract in November to build a foundational materials AI platform that identifies ultra-lightweight polymers capable of replacing titanium.
- Laser and directed-energy protection: Cambium’s growing portfolio of optics and counter-directed-energy products includes Laser Eyewear Protection (LEP) eyeglasses that protect pilots, ground forces, and other operators vulnerable to laser weapons.
To quote Jesse Pinkman, that tech has some investors saying, “Science, bitch!”
Money moves: Alongside 8VC, Lockheed’s venture arm, MVP Ventures, Veteran Ventures Capital (VVC), J17 Ventures, Vanderbilt University, Silent Ventures’ Jackson Moses, and a bunch of others participated in the Series B, bringing Cambium’s total funding to over $127M since it launched in 2020. With that fresh capital, scaling is on the menu, and they’re already making some big moves.
Last month, they snapped up UK-based advanced composites manufacturer SHD Group, giving Cambium a global footprint to ramp up production of their advanced materials. That acquisition, longtime investors told Tectonic, drew on some of the Series B funding and looks like it could be a game-changer for the startup.
“They’re using AI and high-performance computing to design materials much faster, but they’re also pairing that with the substantial in-house qualification and production capabilities of SHD, which has a pretty substantial global footprint,” VVC GP Craig Jaques told Tectonic. “Those capabilities are now vertically aligned and able to deliver much faster to some of their most critical customers, most of which are the national security community.”
“Nearly every priority capability that we’re investing in—hypersonics, missile defense, space resilience, directed energy, unmanned systems, and next-generation aircraft—are fundamentally limited by materials performance, the qualification timelines associated with them, and production capacity,” Jaques added. “From our perspective, we were looking for a company that could meet that urgency.”
Double down: Like Veteran Ventures, both MVP Ventures and Silent Ventures also participated in Cambium’s $19M Series A in 2023, and they’re equally bullish on the startup’s odds, especially after snapping up SHD.
“We’ve gotten to see the company execute now going on three years, and it’s really transformed from really cool AI materials discovery technology to, with the acquisition of [SHD], manufacturing scale,” MVP Ventures Managing Partner Weston Moyer told Tectonic. “The AI-powered materials discovery side of the business now has manufacturing scale to deliver parts at scale and speed, and that’s really what gets us excited.”
Silent Ventures founder Jackson Moses, whose stacked portfolio includes Castelion, CHAOS, Saronic, and Hadrian, told Tectonic that Cambium being “an 8VC build” has him feeling confident since “my good friends over there definitely know a thing or two about deep tech,” but “aside from this, the team is world class and a perfect blend of academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs.”
“They’re incredibly well-positioned as the leading advanced materials supplier for defense and deep tech applications,” he added. With $100M and a global composite manufacturer in hand, we’d have to agree.