Welp, they’ve gone and done it again.
This morning, precision munitions startup Heaviside announced that it’s raised a $60M Series B at a $600M valuation just three months after emerging from stealth with a $28M Series A.
- The round was led by Felicis with “significant participation from Hedosophia.”
- Menlo Ventures, Cantos, Flume Ventures, QStar Capital, Friends & Family Capital, Anorak Ventures, MVP Ventures, and “other investors” were also on the cap table.
The company is also teaming up with Norwegian munitions giant Nammo—the firm will provide the warhead for Heaviside’s “multi-domain precision munitions platforms, providing world-class warheads and a secure, resilient supply chain.”
“Partnering with Nammo marks a major milestone for Heaviside, expanding our ability to deliver robust, fully integrated, and cost-effective precision munitions to customers at speed,” Phillip Walker, Heaviside CEO, said in a statement. “Combined with our recent Series B financing, this partnership positions Heaviside to quickly scale and deliver our precision strike solutions to warfighters and allied customers worldwide.”
The munitions business really is, quite literally, booming, y’all. (Again, please forgive us.)
New kids on the block: Now, Heaviside is a pretty new player on the go-boom scene.
The company emerged from stealth (in an exclusive release to Tectonic, actually) back in May after quietly building autonomous precision munitions for the US and allied forces for about two years.
- For context: Not only is the US burning through its munitions like there’s no tomorrow, but the ones we have aren’t particularly precise. When we talked to Walker back in May, he said that “these munitions [that] were advertising one or two meter…accuracy [are] now seeing eight, ten, 20, 50 meters.” That is not particularly good for, say, targeted strikes.
- Walker set up Heaviside to, put simply, build these munitions better. They keep details on what they’re actually building pretty tight to the chest, but the idea is to bring down cost and speed up production while maintaining the speed and accuracy of legacy, exquisite platforms.
- Again, scant on details, but the company says it’s building “autonomous precision munitions platforms across air, land, and sea for U.S. and allied forces.” Back in May, Walker said they had “autonomous precision munitions in the air right now” and “more than one autonomous precision munition on the water.”
- They’re also working directly with operators—like, US and allied SF operators—to test the platforms and make sure they’re building exactly what they need.
Ultimately, per Walker, the goal is to have “dozens” of products in each domain portfolio (land, air, sea) and to churn out tens of thousands of these new-age munitions annually.
Get down to it: Back in May, Walker said they raised their Series A to “fuel adoption across [their] customer base” and “begin increasing production capacities…going from small batch production to low-rate and medium-rate production.”
With this new bag o’ cash, it sounds like they are doing more of the same at an even bigger scale. Heaviside says it will “ramp the company’s production capacity, accelerate hiring, fulfill existing customer commitments, and meet future demand.”
- The company has existing facilities in Oslo, Norway (hence Nammo) and LA. With this new funding, they say they will also “expand its operational footprint across the US.”
“The US needs these [munitions], and they need them now,” Walker said back in May. “They need a practical partner that can get them to them very quickly. And I believe Heaviside is going to be able to move product very quickly into their hands because of the way that we’re set up.”
$60M in fresh cash money probably helps, too.
