Are you feeling the reindustrialize vibes yet? Well, you should, because defense and automotive manufacturing startup Divergent just closed a $290M Series E at a $2.3B valuation. The company already has some big-time manufacturing contracts with the primes, but Divergent is setting its sights on scaling with the defense tech newcomers now, too.
Behind the scenes: If you haven’t heard of Divergent, your favorite defense hardware startup has. While companies are stealing headlines with flashy hypersonic missiles, unmanned aircraft, and USVs, Divergent is building their manufacturing backbone. So far, the company has won contracts with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, and other major players in the defense arena. (Not to mention Bugatti, Aston Martin, and McLaren on the fast and fun automotive side, which is where they got their start.)
Their main offering, the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), is what’s made them so popular:
- DAPS features their in-house, AI-enabled engineering and design software that optimizes structures for performance and manufacturability.
- After design, DAPS uses industrial-scale metal 3D printing to produce structural components using application-specific alloys. The print step is built for volume and speed.
- The robotic manufacturing system can assemble everything from missile systems to Group 4 and 5 drone airframes, USVs, and whatever else their growing list of customers wants to make—and fast. They then sell the end product back to their customers.
Doubling down: Divergent’s CEO Lukas Czinger, who co-founded Divergent with his dad in 2014, told Tectonic that the main reason for their big-time $290M raise—led by Rochefort Asset Management—was to double down on defense. “We’re well-positioned as a supplier, a layer below all these primes, that has a unique as-a-service model, where it’s engineering-as-a-service and, most importantly, manufacturing-as-a-service.”
“In the last three years, we’ve gone from no aerospace and defense programs to over 20 active contracts across 12-plus of the leading primes—both large, established primes like Lockheed and Raytheon, and also some of the newcomers in startup space,” he added.
Behind the headlines: Those primes and neo-primes have contracted manufacturing out to Divergent for everything from the “headline hypersonics programs” to CCA-class drones. Asked if Divergent was behind the General Atomics CCA airframe, Czinger said that it’s “not a bad guess.”
With this fresh $290M capital infusion, Divergent has its eyes set on all of the fancy new tech coming onto the scene. “As we expand out, you’ll see us getting more into propulsion, UAVs, ground vehicles, and the shipbuilding arena, especially on the smaller scale unmanned surface craft,” Czinger told Tectonic. “That’s definitely already a market that’s developing today, as we go much wider with the platform.”
He also confirmed that Saronic was a “partner,” but couldn’t say on which programs.
Sights set on startups: The defense tech hype has Divergent—and everyone else—shifting its focus from the primes to the “late-stage defense startups we think are going to win programs of record.” Those startups, Czinger said, “are even more agile than the large primes, so our value-add is especially large for a smaller team that’s designing quickly, looking to iterate, and get into production as quickly as possible.”
“We’ll have news out with some of them as we release the exact programs and names,” he added, “but they’re pretty much the usual suspects that you would think of.”
We can think of a few that might fit the bill.