The hype for hypersonics is back, baby.
On Friday, El Segundo-based hypersonic missile startup Castelion announced that they’ve officially closed their $350M Series B, led by Altimeter Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Lavrock Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, First In, Space VC, Cantos, BlueYard, Avenir, Champion Hill, and Interlagos.
The round—first rumored back in July—brings the company’s total funding raised to $464M, according to PitchBook data.
“Blackbeard helps close America’s hypersonic capability gap against China and Russia,” Castelion CEO and Co-Founder Bryon Hargis said in a statement, referring to the company’s flagship hypersonic missile. “This funding lets us build fast, test often, and produce at volumes that matter in the real world.”
Who else had a super-speedy missile on their Christmas wishlist?
Speed run: Castelion—founded back in 2022 by a team of SpaceX alums—has been on quite the run.
- The company’s flagship missile—Blackbeard—is designed to be a more affordable version of something like Lockheed Martin’s “Dark Eagle” Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which costs about $41M. Pitt told Tectonic last month that Blackbeard runs into the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
- The company raised a $14M seed round in May 2023 and a $100M Series A in January of this year.
- In October, the company announced that it had won “multiple awards” to integrate Blackbeard onto operational US Army and Navy platforms.
- The company’s super-speedy missile also got a $25M carveout in the Army’s budget request this year—the service wants to build a variant that can be launched by a HIMARS.
- In November, Castelion announced that it would build out a hypersonic production and testing facility in New Mexico. Construction is expected to start in January, and the “campus” will be at full capacity by 2027.
Pocket padding: Castelion says that a big chunk of the $350M will be used to build out this facility and scale production. Makes sense, considering that Pitt told Tectonic the company would invest a whole $100M of its own cash in the project—nicknamed Project Ranger.
- At full capacity, the facility will be able to “churn out thousands of Blackbeard missiles per year.”
- The company says it will also ramp up testing next year, “with increasingly complex capability demonstrations and integration with operational launch platforms.
- They’re also working on a new product—they plan to launch a “second hypersonic product line, leveraging shared low-cost subsystem infrastructure.”
Up and up: The focus, it seems, is to keep moving lightning-quick—the company says it conducted more than 20 flight tests in 2025, and plans to do way more next year. And some of the industry’s top investors are very much on board with this speedy-quick approach.
“Castelion isn’t just building missiles; they’re rebuilding America’s industrial depth,” Connor Love, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in a statement. “This team has proven they can move from blank sheet design to hardware under test faster than anyone thought possible.”
Alex Poulin, partner at Lavrock Ventures, added that, “Hypersonics only matter if you can build them at scale. Castelion’s team understands that, and they’re engineering a production-ready capability designed for real-world manufacturing and deployment. We’re proud to be early backers of a team focused on delivering capacity, not just concepts.”