Another day, another defense tech funding round.
Yesterday, Darkhive announced that it’s raised $30M in a Series B funding round led by RTX Ventures to deliver on the $49.7M APFIT contract—the program’s highest single award to date—that the San Antonio-based startup won in December and went public with in March.
Hive hype: Founded in 2021, Darkhive is one of those “grind in silence” defense startups that stays out of the limelight, but it’s made a name for itself on both the hardware and software sides of the ball.
- Counting the APFIT contract, the company has secured nearly $64M in contracts and raised a total of $55M across its 2023 seed, 2024 Series A, and yesterday’s Series B.
Darkhive bills itself as a tactical autonomy and edge software company built around small UAS, and its product portfolio has clearly got its backers and buyers hyped about the ‘hive. That tech includes:
- Yellowjacket: A square-shaped, teeny tiny eight-inch ISR drone designed for indoor and outdoor use, operated by Darkhive’s Broodbox software.
- Obelisk: A foldable, four-foot-wide autonomous ISR drone with a 45-minute flight time and EO/IR payloads and software capable of spotting and classifying vessels on the water’s surface.
- Fleetforge: A software platform designed to speed up software integration and “continuous delivery” for UAS.
Darkhive’s nearly $50M APFIT contract, classified under “Real-Time Command and Control at the Tactical Edge,” was focused on FLEETFORGE and Darkhive’s “software-defined hardware compute and communication products,” the company told Tectonic.
That big ol’ contract—which brushed up against the APFIT program’s $50M cap—was also the main reason Darkhive raised the $30M in fresh cash. “We chose to raise this round to accelerate delivery on current commitments and forecasted demand for large volume orders,” Darkhive said, and they “formally opened the round in March after the award of the APFIT.”
Prime pals: Winning the largest award in APFIT history is pretty validating, but having some friends at the second-largest defense prime in your corner doesn’t hurt either.
RTX Ventures—the mega-prime’s VC arm—first backed Darkhive in their Series A, and, according to the startup, having them take the lead on the Series B “demonstrates their belief in our team, our products, and how far we are positioned to take our products in support of the warfighter.”
- New investors Draper Associates and Bison Capital also participated in the round, along with Darkhive’s existing backers 1011 Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Alamo Angels, and Stellar Ventures.
“This funding round will help accelerate the maturation of their core hardware and software products for integration into operationally validated systems and new programs of record,” RTX Ventures Managing Director Dan Ateya added in a statement.
Always heartwarming to see the giants backing the defense world’s next generation.