Castelion

Castelion is a defense manufacturing company building the systems America and its partners need to keep liberal democracies safe and deter future wars. The company’s first product is a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) for the US Department of Defense. Traditional defense primes such as Lockheed & Raytheon have failed to develop an HGV despite receiving billions of dollars per year in funding for the last 20 years. Meanwhile, China & Russia have developed fully operational HGVs, emboldening them to expand their borders militarily.

“To counter this growing threat, and to support democracy for generations to come, America’s defense industry needs new technologies, new manufacturing approaches, and new ideas to stay unequivocally ahead. That’s why we founded Castelion — a new kind of defense manufacturing company.”

The Castelion team comes from SpaceX, where they made substantial contributions, including leading the development of Starlink & Starshield, and billions of dollars in sales to governments.

Our Thesis

Incumbent defense primes will be unable to attract the necessary talent to iterate fast enough to keep up with adversary nations on hypersonic glide vehicles. The SpaceX approach provides the best odds of liberal democracies catching up technologically while also providing venture-scale returns. If Castelion is successful at delivering a cost-effective HGV, they have the potential to apply its development methodology and team to more US Department of Defense capabilities and become a large standalone defense prime.

We are excited to be backing the Castelion team on their mission to build essential hypersonic deterrence systems to keep democracies safe. Read more about their $14.2 million financing here.