The summer of love for the primes and the startups is taking on a new shape.
Yesterday, hypersonic aircraft startup Hermeus and RTX’s subsidiary and engine-making giant Pratt & Whitney announced a licensing deal that sets the stage for Hermeus to start producing Pratt’s F100 jet engine, which powers both Hermeus’ Quarterhorse supersonic unmanned aircraft and much older jets like the F-15 and F-16.
In other words: Hermeus will be able to manufacture the engine for its own super-speedy drone and give Pratt some extra production capacity for its other F100 customers. Vertical integration, so hot right now.
“It’s a huge deal because it allows us to own the single biggest choke point in any aircraft manufacturer’s supply chain, which is propulsion,” Hermeus CEO Zach Shore told Tectonic. “Elon has really brought this into vogue in space with vertical integration across the board, but it hasn’t been seen in aircraft or in aviation before, so our ability to not only support the [defense industrial base] and the increasing demand for Pratt, but also to own our own destiny is N-of-1.”
Zoom zoom: By now, Hermeus needs little introduction, so we’ll keep it brief. The Atlanta-born, California-based company was founded back in 2018 to build lower-cost, ultra-speedy aircraft. Their ultimate goal is hypersonic (or close to it).
- Their aircraft series is called the Quarterhorse, which began with the Quarterhorse Mk 0 for ground testing in 2024 and has progressed to unmanned supersonic flight with the Mk 2.1 iteration in May.
- Their Mk 2.2 (which will push closer to Mach 2) is in production in Atlanta and will fly at speeds “well over supersonic” later this year, per Shore.
- That’s backed by nearly $550M in VC funding, most recently a $350M Series C at a $1B valuation in April, and a $219M-ceiling DIU contract for Quarterhorse—one of the largest ever awarded by DIU, according to the company.
- Earlier this month, they also partnered with Anduril to integrate the neo-prime’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy stack on the Quarterhorse Mk 2 aircraft, setting up Anduril as Quarterhorse’s autonomy software provider for the long haul.
Going vertical: The deal with Pratt, according to Shore, makes Hermeus the first fully vertically integrated aircraft manufacturer, which is handy—for both sides—given Pratt’s major production backlog.
The engines Hermeus will make will be for both its own Quarterhorse aircraft and other aircraft that use the F100 (namely the F-15 and F-16), Shore said, but the path to getting there and the investments required “are not insignificant.”
“The first step is qualifying our builds, making sure that they’re accepted by Pratt and they meet the standard of what a Pratt F100 is,” Shore said. “From there, we’ll dig into exploring the supply chain—where we can bring in new parts, qualify new parts, drive costs down, and add capacity.”
“As far as scaling into high-rate production, that’s going to be demand-driven, like anything else,” he added. “We’ll support infrastructure development as demand develops for both more Quarterhorse [aircraft] for the government and for other aircraft that require F100 engines.”
Better together: But the big deal, according to Shore, is that it’s another example of Hermeus playing nice with the defense world’s old guard and the newcomers.
“Between this and the Anduril partnership, what we’re trying to show here with Hermeus is the [we’re working with] the best-in-breed of old and new, and this is what the service leaders, the secretaries, SecWar are looking for in terms of everybody playing together,” he said. “We’re a pretty interesting use case, both being a really heavy hardware system, but partnered at the same time with Anduril on the autonomy and Pratt & Whitney on the propulsion.”
“I think it speaks to the credibility of us as an aircraft manufacturer that we can also build these types of partnerships with the preeminent and more established firms in the defense industrial base,” he added.
