Air defense startup Singularity Defense Corp. formally launched today, announcing that it has raised $80 million in new funding at a $400 million valuation to mass-produce low-cost interceptors that can knock down the cheap drones and missiles now common on the battlefield.
Cost is the problem Singularity says it can fix. An interceptor can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The drone it takes down might cost a few thousand. Militaries are firing them off faster than they can build replacements and cheap drones have swarmed the fighting in Ukraine and the waters around the Strait of Hormuz.
The interceptors remain in development. Co-founder and Chief Executive Jack Oswald described them only as “much lower cost” than a Patriot battery or a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system but declined to share specifications.
“We’re staying pretty damn light on details because we want to go and deploy to two active conflict zones,” Oswald told Axios.
Much of the company’s pitch rests on manufacturing rather than the hardware alone. Its production team, drawn largely from Tesla Inc. and Toyota Motor Corp., is building an automotive-style assembly line meant to ramp output beyond any comparable U.S. system. Rather than integrating parts from dozens of suppliers, the way traditional defense contractors do, Singularity builds its subsystems in-house and sources commercial components.
Oswald founded the Los Angeles company with Chief Operating Officer Shail Giroux. Its roughly 65 employees include alumni of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Anduril Industries Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., Tesla and Toyota, alongside former service members who deployed air defenses in combat.
Singularity has also lined up a roster of military advisers, among them former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, former U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Jim Dickinson and former Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Volodymyr Havrylov.
Oswald traces the company’s founding to meetings with wounded operators in Ukraine. “The scale of avoidable casualties from low-cost munitions in recent years is gut-wrenching,” he said in the company’s announcement. “The U.S. has had the technology to defeat these threats for decades, but as adversaries stockpile millions and put them to use, we’ve reached a true crisis for interceptor inventory and production volume.”
The Series A round was led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis, with participation from earlier backers AE Ventures Fund III LP and New Enterprise Associates. Long Journey, Harpoon, Menlo Ventures Management LP, Y Combinator, Decisive Point, New Vista, Sunflower and Soma also joined.
Photo: Singularity
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