Hypersonic missiles — systems that are capable of striking at long-range and high-speed, yet still remain accurate — are not a part of the arsenal of any NATO power today, but many nations are racing to get to that point. On Monday, Hypersonica, one of the more promising startups in the space, announced €100 million ($111 million) in funding in aid of that.
Lightspeed and General Catalyst — the US VCs that have become two of the biggest defence tech investors in Europe — are co-leading this round, Plural and 201 Ventures also participating. The latter two were both in the startup’s €23 million Series A, which we covered here; General Catalyst previously led Hypersonica’s seed round. The company has raised around €125 million to date, and it is not disclosing its valuation.
The startup said it would use the Series B to continue with its research and development as well as to build out more manufacturing infrastructure, which includes further testing of prototypes beyond its first effort back in February, when it tested a prototype of its HS-1 model travelled above Mach 6 over more than 300 kilometres — the first privately funded European defence company to hit this milestone, it said.
Hypersonica’s claim is that when its missiles are in full production, they will come in at just 20% of the cost of the more “conventional” missiles the startup is aiming to replace when they are fully functional in 2029.
Hypersonica is working on very compressed timelines at the moment, not least because of the urgency that would-be buyers are facing. Both Russia and China reportedly have deep programmes to build out hypersonic weapons, capable of travelling thousands of miles and at speeds of greater than Mach 5. Russia has reportedly already used hypersonic weapons in its war with Ukraine.
“Usually missile development programmes can take 10 or 20 years, or even more,” CEO Dr Philipp Kerth (who co-founded the company with CTO Marc Ewenz) told Resilience Media earlier this year. “But we don’t have 20 years in Europe.”
Earlier this year, Plural partner Ian Hogarth described to Resilience Media the mission for the founders, beyond building pure weaponry: it is also the need for “credible deterrence,” he said.
“We realised there is a very good reason why adversaries are working hard on this technology,” Kerth told Resilience Media. To let Europe continue to be Europe — prosperous, democratic, “and such a great place to live” — the need for the region to have the same technology as its adversaries, he said, “is crucial.”
The company does not disclose any specific customers but indicates that it’s in the room with a number of would-be buyers.
“We are responding to a very clear demand signal from several European countries and from NATO,” Kerth said. “They have made it very clear that they want European States to have and build hypersonic capability.”
There has been some financial commitment to the concept too from governments. The UK and Germany are co-funding a deep precision strike programme as part of their Trinity House Agreement; and NATO has estimated that nations in its alliance will be putting £37 billion into deep precision strike capabilities in the next 10 years — although that is more projection than concrete funding.
Even with this landmark, nine-figure round, Hypersonica will really have to put its claims of lower costs and faster iteration cycles to the test. Major prime contractors can typically put €20 billion (along with decades of time) into a new missile R&D programme. They too are working on developing hypersonic missile systems.
Outside of that, hypersonics development has been a mixed bag.
Alongside government-backed consortia, you have startups like Destinus — the startup that Helsing recently took a stake in reportedly valuing the Dutch company at $6 billion. Once Destinus also positioned itself as hypersonic-focused, but these days it seems to have pivoted into a wider range of precision strike missiles.
North Vector Dynamics, a Canadian startup, also started with a focus on hypersonics; last week it announced some significant tie-ups with a Polish partner and investors to the tune of $20 million not for hypersonic but for jet-powered drones. Castelion in the US raised more than $1 billion in August and continues to work hypersonic aircraft and defence applications, including a move earlier this year into developing for the maritime domain in collaboration with Saronic.
