Low-cost, mass-producible hypersonic strike missiles — Blackbeard went from clean sheet to Navy program of record in under four years
HQ: Torrance, California, United States | Founded: 2022 | Employees: Not publicly disclosed | Stage: Series C | Website: https://www.castelion.com
Castelion was founded in 2022 by three SpaceX alumni — Bryon Hargis (CEO), Sean Pitt (COO), and Andrew Kreitz (CFO) — with a specific grievance about American weapons manufacturing: the U.S. had fallen behind China in hypersonic missiles largely because traditional primes build small numbers of exquisite systems at enormous cost. Castelion's bet was the opposite: design a hypersonic missile from day one to be manufactured like a product, at commercial unit cost, in thousands per year.
That missile is Blackbeard, a ground-launched hypersonic strike weapon the company describes as the first American hypersonic engineered from inception for industrial-rate output. Castelion took Blackbeard from clean-sheet design to program of record in under four years — a timeline that traditatically took a decade — with repeated flight tests, Army and Navy platform-integration awards in October 2025, and fielding targeted for 2027. In September 2026, the U.S. Navy awarded the company $200M for Blackbeard production, part of more than $500M in military contracts secured over the prior 18 months.
The capital has followed the contracts. Lightspeed led the Series A before a complete system had flown; a $350M Series B closed in December 2025 at a $3B valuation led by Redpoint; and in August 2026 the company raised a $1B Series C — $800M equity plus a $250M revolving credit facility — co-led by JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and Carlyle at a $13 billion valuation, with T. Rowe Price joining as a new investor.
Manufacturing is the moat. Castelion's Project Ranger campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico — 1,000 acres and the largest dedicated hypersonic missile manufacturing facility in the nation — broke ground in January 2026 with more than $220M committed, mixing its own propellant and shipping hardware to the services. The Series C accelerates three priorities: maximum-rate Blackbeard production, a longer-range precision strike system leveraging Blackbeard's core technologies, and lower-cost defensive systems for air and missile defense. The company also announced a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Saronic in June 2026 to demonstrate hypersonic launches from autonomous surface vessels, targeting a 2027 demonstration.
Castelion is applying the SpaceX playbook to missiles: instead of building a few exquisite hypersonic weapons, it is engineering Blackbeard from the start for factory-scale production at commercial cost — and the market has confirmed the thesis with $500M+ in military contracts and a $13B valuation less than four years after founding.
Category: Aerospace & Defense Startups
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