Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce our $25M Seed Round, led by Benchmark Capital.
When Aris and I started this company in May of 2025, our vision was simple: that while America made the best defense technology in the world, the rate at which it is currently produced is critically deficient. We were seeing what was happening in the Red Sea in 2024, and the budding discourse around the wildly asymmetric cost exchange occurring between modern threats and the American-made systems designed to defeat them.
While we saw the discourse around cost asymmetry to be tremendously important, we felt it to largely be missing the point. A single SM-6 or PAC-3 costing $3M, while an exorbitant number, cannot be solely judged versus the cost of the incoming threat (for a Shahed/Geran, often as low as $30K). It must also truthfully be assessed on the value of what it is protecting, typically hundreds of lives plus hundreds of millions of dollars in base or ship assets. The bigger issue, which less were focused on at the time, is that the production rates of these exquisite interceptors nowhere near matched their consumption rates, a worrisome trend. The core issue was not asymmetry in cost, but rather asymmetry in consumption.
A world in which China alone (not to mention Iran, Russia, and the DPRK) boastfully claims annual production capacity of offensive systems two orders of magnitude greater than American defensive production is not a world we were willing to sit idly by in. We started Furientis with production volume top of mind and set out to architect a vehicle (and company) centered around rapid iteration and design for manufacturability. Every design decision would be made against two criteria: can this be made at 1,000 units per factory per year? And does this enable a 30-minute-per-vehicle final assembly time?
Since the company’s founding, we’ve been hard at work towards rapidly maturing our interceptor platforms, as the demand has never been greater. We’ve been laser focused on development: testing seeker and controls actuation subsystems on the benchtop, iteratively implementing them onto our flight vehicles on the test range, and rinsing and repeating this cadence at a pace unmatched in industry. In parallel, we’ve begun to make early investments in rate producibility. With solid rocket motors being one example, we recently opened our first of two envisioned propellant manufacturing facilities. That footprint enables safe, scalable motor production and testing of up to dozens per month, today. To quantify this pace: in the last 10 months, our team has conducted 21 vehicle tests, including 13 vehicle flight tests and 8 static fires. This is in stark comparison to the legacy aerospace contractors, which often take multiple years just to conceptually design and model a missile, before outputting a prototype so expensive and complex they are lucky to get it to the flight test range more than quarterly.
Our recent technical progress is coupled with strong program successes, as over the last few months, we’ve signed a funded OTA contract with the Department of War, advanced to the finals of multiple government missile competitions with tangible through-lines to production, and forged various commercial teaming agreements to maximize our product and platform capabilities.
This track record of successful execution and emphasis on small accountable teams is what mutually drew us and Benchmark together. After spending time getting to know Chetan, a GP at Benchmark, it quickly became apparent that this was the right partner at this inflection point in the business. Despite this being Benchmark’s first investment into a pure defense tech company, in our first few meetings together, Chetan displayed a strong understanding of the evolution of the industry from the timeframe of past decades as well as the recent past few years. He, and the rest of the partners at Benchmark, demonstrated a deep curiosity in both the current team and product as well as the founding story and our respective roots in the rocketry space. Their team’s collective experience in helping some of the most legendary companies of our time scale has already proven useful in the short time we’ve worked together. We couldn’t ask for better partners for what comes next.
With this new infusion of capital, we’re able to focus more significantly on hiring elite talent, building out our in-house manufacturing and testing capabilities, and accelerating progress on our multiple programs alongside customers and end users. We’re thrilled to share this news and even more excited for the year ahead. There is no more significant time in history to build interceptors, and our team is up for the challenge.
We are hiring talented engineers across all disciplines and have an aggressive calendar ahead. If this resonates with you, we want to hear from you. Learn more at furientis.com/careers or reach us at careers@furientis.com.
Brody Franzen