Founders Fund
Canvas Category Consultancy : Company : Venture Capital
We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult scientific or engineering problems.
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Impulse Space Secures $150M In Series B Funding To Support Ongoing Company Momentum
Impulse Space, a leader in the development of in-space transportation services, announced a $150 million Series B funding round, led by Founders Fund. The round also included participation from other returning investors like Lux Capital and Spring Tide, as well as attracting new investors, such as DCVC. Other participants in the funding round included Airbus Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Balerion Space Ventures, RTX Ventures, Tamarack Global, 137 Ventures, Elysium, First Principles Group, Island Green, Overmatch, and Trousdale Ventures. The funding, which follows a series of recent milestone moments for the company, will be used to further grow the Impulse team and to support the ongoing production of both the Helios and Mira vehicles. The Series B round brings Impulse’s total funding to date to $225 million.
The Series B funding continues the strong momentum for Impulse. This year alone, the company has been selected by SpaceWERX for a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) award, two Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) awards, announced a new GEO Rideshare Program, and completed the record-setting LEO Express-1 mission. The team is currently preparing for the upcoming launch of the LEO Express-2 mission, which will see a Mira vehicle support deployment and hosting services for multiple customers.
Anduril Raises $1.5 Billion to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy
Anduril Industries announced it has secured $1.5 billion of funding for its Series F round to hyperscale defense manufacturing. This funding will enable Anduril to increase hiring, enhance processes, upgrade tooling, increase resiliency in its supply chain and expand infrastructure. Anduril is also investing in Arsenal, the manufacturing platform for modern warfare. With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to manufacture and produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems addressing the urgent needs of the United States and our allies.
Co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, Anduril’s Series F values the company at $14 billion and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, as well as major commitments from existing investors including Altimeter and Franklin Venture Partners.
Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts
Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated. Eakin, Layup’s CEO, would still be with Anduril, he says, if not for the idea to found Layup. “It was born out of a need that we had at Anduril — a need that the world has that became poignant during my time there,” he said.
Most areas of manufacturing have changed over the course of Eakin’s career, except composites, he said. Companies like Protolabs, Xometry and Fictiv have innovated processes like CNC-machining, sheet metal cutting and injection molding. These companies (and many others) have developed a frictionless, almost Amazon-like experience to getting hardware manufactured rapidly, and that’s left a permanent mark on the industry.
But there’s been no equivalent innovation in composite parts manufacturing. There are a few reasons for this, Eakin said. The first is that existing composites manufacturers aren’t well leveraged to develop the software tools required to do it well; the other is that composites are more artisanal and less easily automatable in certain steps of the process. So bringing the number of humans in the manufacturing loop close to zero is inherently more tricky.
Armada Raises More Than $55M to Bridge the Digital Divide
Armada, an edge computing pioneer redefining the future of connectivity, compute and AI, today exited stealth. The company marks this milestone with a significant capital raise exceeding $55M, led by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital and 8090 Industries, with participation from Felicis, Contrary, Valor Equity Partners, Marlinspike, 137 Ventures, Koch Real Estate Investments, 8VC and a cohort of other strategic investors. This funding will propel Armada forward in its mission to bridge the global digital divide, empowering businesses and communities to leverage all of their data, regardless of where it’s generated. Armada is dedicated to unlocking the potential of generative AI, edge computing and predictive models on a global scale.
Armada provides a full-stack infrastructure solution, deployable on both on-premise and cloud infrastructures, to deliver optimal edge computing and cutting edge satellite internet connectivity to the world’s most remote regions. This empowers companies to harness the power of generative AI and predictive models where they are most needed, enabling a range of industries — from utilities and infrastructure to military and mining — to dramatically enhance their real-time processing, analysis and decision-making capabilities, right where their data resides.
🔐 Galvanick Announces $10 Million in Seed Funding for Its Industrial Cybersecurity Platform
Galvanick, the cybersecurity solution for protecting industrial infrastructure against cyber attacks, today announced its $10 million seed round. Major investors included MaC Venture Capital, Founders Fund, Village Global, Countdown Capital, Hanover Technology Investment Management, Shrug Capital, 8090 Industries, and over 25 angel investors specializing in cybersecurity, manufacturing, finance, and defense. Galvanick plans to use the capital to make additional core hires, and expand use of its initial product – an industrial-first Extended Detection & Response (XDR) platform – to additional advanced manufacturing and critical infrastructure facilities.
Anduril Raises $1.48 Billion in Series E Funding
Defense technology company Anduril Industries today announced $1.48 billion in Series E funding, valuing the company at $8.48 billion, nearly doubling the company’s previous valuation in June 2021. The new funding will enable Anduril to accelerate research and development to bring new, cutting edge, autonomous defense capabilities to the market and continue to mature and scale its current business lines with the US Department of Defense as well as US allies and partners.
The problems US and allied militaries are facing are fundamentally software problems. To continue to enable the US, allies and partners to deter adversaries, Anduril is building software-defined and hardware-enabled capabilities that solve mission needs with autonomy, today. Autonomous systems will enable the military to operate faster and at greater scale across both tactical and strategic operations.
ISEE, the first company to achieve fully-autonomous operations with their self-driving yard trucks, raises $40 million in Series B.
Self-driving technology company, ISEE, has raised $40M in a Series B funding round led by Founders Fund, that included Maersk Growth, Eniac Ventures, New Legacy and other new and existing investors. This brings ISEE’s total funding to $70 million since the company was spun out of MIT in 2017.
With ISEE’s technology, customers can achieve 30% IRR, while simultaneously benefiting from a sophisticated tech stack that enables them to manage their operations with unprecedented efficiency. ISEE is winning too: revenue has grown by more than 20x in the past 12 months alone. Co-founder, President & COO Debbie Yu feels this is only the beginning, “With this new funding and strong customer pipeline, we’re excited to scale our operations and accelerate our business growth so that we can bring our self-driving technology to more customers.”
Anduril Raises $450 Million in Series D Funding
Defense technology company Anduril Industries today announced $450 million in Series D funding and a post-money valuation of $4.6 billion, more than double the company’s previous valuation in July 2020.
Anduril’s Lattice AI software platform, hardware products, and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the UK Ministry of Defence, as well as other agencies. Lattice uses computer vision, machine learning, and mesh networking to fuse real-time sensor data to create a single, autonomous operating picture and command and control platform. Lattice ties together Anduril’s family of site security solutions deployed along the southwest border to provide situational awareness, and on military bases in the U.S. and abroad to autonomously detect, track, and interdict intrusions by people, drones, and other vehicles. Lattice is also the operating system that enables Anduril’s autonomous unmanned aircraft, such as the new Ghost 4 sUAS, to perform their missions.