Well, it’s official. Just about two months after reports first surfaced that a super-stealthy UK startup had raised about $100M at a $400M valuation to build missile and drone defense systems for Europe, Cambridge Aerospace is officially out in the open. The company is formally launching its first two products—Skyhammer and Starhammer—at DSEI next week, and will soon begin ramping up production in the UK and Europe.
The company is reportedly backed by Accel, Lakestar and Lux Capital, and already has a team of about 60 people. They’re also building out an SRM production facility in the UK. Big week.
Co-founder and CEO Steven Barrett, a former MIT aerospace engineer and current professor at Cambridge University, confirmed that the company has about $100M in hand and said their goal is to build cheaper-yet-effective interceptors that can take out everything from a Shahed drone to a ballistic missile.
“Our objective is to eliminate the risk of drones and missiles to the UK, Europe, and our allies, and our aim is to do that in a way that’s dramatically lower costs than existing providers of air defense systems,” he said.
Plus, he added, the cheaper your air defense, the more you can produce. And the more you can produce, the more people you can protect.
“If we can bring costs down by 90 percent, 95 percent, maybe even 99 percent, then defending the populace becomes a much more realistic thing to do,” he said. “Particularly when you look at what’s going on in Ukraine…we just think we have a moral duty to find cost-effective ways to defend the population.”
Smarty pants: So, what is Cambridge Aerospace? According to UK filings, the company was founded in 2024 by Barrett, along with Anduril’s former director of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Chris Sylvan, and former UK defense secretary Grant Shapps. Junaid Hussain, chair and founder at holding company Auctor, also helped build the company.
The company is based out of Cambridge (fitting), but is also producing in Norfolk, in the east of England. So far, they have two interceptors (basically defensive missiles):
- Skyhammer: A “high subsonic interceptor” designed to take down moderate-speed threats like Shahed drones, according to Barrett. Skyhammer flies at Mach 0.7 and has a range of about 30 km, and should cost in the “tens of thousands” of dollars, according to Barratt.
- Starhammer: A high-speed rocket-powered interceptor designed to take down more “high-speed, high-value threats” like cruise missiles, Barrett said. Starhammer flies at Mach 2 and has a range of about 10 km.
The interceptors do carry a payload, but a smaller one than an offensive missile, Barrett said. They take down targets using a process called “sympathetic detonation,” where they have just enough explosive to basically ignite the target’s payload and make it blow itself up. Cool.
The company began testing Skyhammer in February and has already produced dozens for testing (and, presumably, destroying), according to Barrett. Starhammer is in active development. Barrett also said the company is working on a longer-range version of Starhammer that will be able to counter ballistic missiles, which should be released next year.
The goal with all of the company’s products, he added, is to keep it cheap enough to build masses of interceptors, and fast. “The aim is to make sure that we can produce these in high numbers and at low cost to deter aggression effectively and also defend Ukraine,” he said.
Go boom: Like many in the high-speed weaponry space, the Cambridge Aerospace guys seem to have caught the solid rocket motor (SRM) bug. We’ve told you this many times before, so we won’t bore you with the details (you can find those here), but basically, the US and its allies have a major SRM supply problem, which has severely limited missile production.
Cambridge Aerospace is setting out to solve that problem—at least in the UK. Barrett told Tectonic that the company is building an SRM production facility in Norfolk to build rocket motors (called Nightstar) for their own systems and, eventually, to sell to other defense companies.
While he couldn’t give us details on the facility (or the propellant), it doesn’t sound like it will be a small operation. Barrett said they’ll be able to churn out “quite a large number of SRMs per month and…will be a significant capability for the UK and Europe to expand the sovereign supply of SRMS, which are really in short supply.” The facility should be online at initial capacity in the early part of next year.
All the cool kids really are doing it.
On the frontline: Throughout our interview, Barrett repeatedly came back to the topic of Ukraine. The war was a massive part of why he decided to found the company, he said, and helping to protect the country is a big part of why they’ve built the weapons they have. In particular, he said Skyhammer could make a big difference in protecting Ukrainians—soldiers and civilians—from Russian threats.
“Defending Ukraine… that’s really one of our highest priority missions,” he said. “At every engineering meeting, we emphasize exactly how many civilians in Ukraine have been killed by Shaheds and other weapons and and our mission is to eliminate that as a threat in the near term.”
But he’s reluctant to use the “tested in Ukraine” red stamp—Cambridge’s weapons have so far been built and tested in the UK. “We are not focusing our testing in Ukraine…because we are very sensitive to wasting people’s time. You know, people who are fighting an active war,” he said.
“We are very focused on deploying things that work extremely well on first use to enable maximum use of resources there,” he added. Love some shade on a Friday.
Future so bright: From here, the plan is to keep testing and building interceptors at a pretty rapid clip. And they’ve got the cash to do it—Barrett said their backing allows them to build (and explode) things quickly, over and over again. With every test and development cycle, he said, they’re able to make the systems better.
He told Tectonic that they do a flight test every week. “The more we test, because we’re using up test articles and we’re using up interceptors, the more quickly we’re manufacturing them. That has enabled us, in parallel to the development [process], to make the manufacturing process more and more efficient,” Barrett said.
Plus, the money and a load of influential, enthusiastic backers mean they can do things fast. “It’s over $100 million [in funding] at this point. It’s enabled us to really move at significant speed without delaying in any way,” he added.
The plan from here is to build out a large production facility in England (timeline TBD) and to start producing in Germany within the next year (they’ve already got an office set up there). From there, they’ve got an eye on Poland. And, of course, they plan to deploy in Ukraine.
While the company does not yet have any public contracts, they say they’re in close conversations with the UK MoD and defense departments across the European continent. “Those discussions are obviously ongoing and not something we can make public at this stage,” Barrett said. “But, you know, they are very close discussions.”