Ursa Major Grabs $100M To Build Hypersonics Faster Than the Pentagon Can Blink
Ursa Major raises $100M to scale hypersonics and rocket motors, accelerating America’s defense tech race with record bookings and real manufacturing power.
If you felt the ground shake today, don’t worry—that wasn’t tectonic activity, it was just Ursa Major slamming a fresh $100 million Series E into the table and announcing it’s ready to scale hypersonics, solid rocket motors, and whatever else makes defense analysts nod solemnly while taxpayers nervously clutch their wallets. Oh, and they also secured an extra $50 million in debt commitments, which is the aerospace equivalent of getting store credit at your favorite explosives boutique.
Welcome to 2025, where the startup world can barely raise a Series A, but companies making things that go Mach-Who-Even-Knows are breezing through nine-figure rounds like they’re ordering takeout.
Ursa Major didn’t just raise money—they crowed about more than $115 million in bookings through the first three quarters of the year. When a startup says “bookings,” that usually means “customers have promised us money.” But when a defense startup says “bookings,” it means the U.S. Department of Defense has put you on speed dial, the Air Force Research Lab is now effectively a recurring client, and Stratolaunch and BAE Systems are rummaging through your catalog like it’s Black Friday for hypersonic engines.
And honestly? Good for them. The rest of tech has spent the year arguing about LLM benchmarks and whether your AI app should have legs; meanwhile, Ursa Major is out here literally launching things into the sky at speeds that make meteorologists give up.
Hitting Milestones While Everyone Else Hits “Rate Limit Exceeded”
CEO Dan Jablonsky—whom SiliconSnark will hereby crown Chief Vibes Officer of Extremely Fast Objects—announced that this raise is just the start of the “next chapter” for the company. That’s CEO-speak for: “Yes, we are about to build even more of the stuff that makes Pentagon procurement officers salivate.”
His victory lap came with a list of milestones that sound like they were drafted by someone playing “Defense Tech Bingo”:
- Successfully flew hypersonic engines several times
- Made progress on solid rocket motor programs
- Completed tests for space propulsion systems
- Set record bookings
- Added heavy-hitting board members like Ronald Sugar and Gilman Louie
It’s an impressive list, though to the average reader, “flew hypersonic several times” sounds like the kind of sentence that should end with “…and now we’re all legally required to salute them.”
In fairness, their tech is legitimately fascinating. Ursa Major is one of the few companies trying to rebuild the U.S. industrial base for next-gen propulsion, an area where “legacy providers” (their words, not mine) have been moving at approximately the same speed as my Comcast router on a bad night.
And let’s be truthful: if America wants anything right now, it’s new manufacturing capacity that doesn’t exist entirely in theory or in a congressional hearing PowerPoint slide.
Scaling the Stuff That Goes Boom
One of my favorite details in this announcement is that Ursa Major is taking this $150M (once you count the debt) and immediately allocating it toward solving “critical strategic industrial base and national security challenges.” Which sounds like a noble cause until you read the next part and realize they’re talking about scaling:
- Throttleable, storable, liquid-fueled hypersonic systems
- Space-based defense capabilities
- Solid rocket motor capacity
- Sustained space mobility tech
Let’s take a moment to appreciate that phrase: “sustained space mobility.” That’s the kind of term that makes venture capitalists nod like they understand orbital mechanics while silently wondering if someone has figured out space Uber.
Eclipse, which led the round, seems thrilled. Founding Partner Lior Susan even offered this gem:
“Ursa Major is doing what few others in defense have achieved — scaling manufacturing and supply chains to deliver hypersonic systems and advanced propulsion at industrial scale.”
Translation: “We bet big, and we would like the universe to know we made a very smart decision, thank you.”
But he’s right. The bottleneck in defense isn’t innovation—it’s manufacturing, logistics, and trying to get anything produced faster than the average Pentagon procurement cycle, which rival historians believe stretches longer than the Roman Empire.
Ursa Major isn’t just building engines—they’re building an actual supply chain, with facilities in Colorado and additive manufacturing in Ohio. That’s not a slide deck. That’s real pipes, real machines, and real people machining parts while wearing ear protection that looks like it was purchased in bulk circa 1998.
Hypersonics: The Hot New Trend That Isn’t Just Hot, It’s Literally Melting
Why the obsession with hypersonics? Easy. Hypersonics are:
- Fast
- Scary
- Incredibly difficult to manufacture
- The one thing everyone in D.C. can agree we need more of
If AI startups are trying to build the future of intelligence, defense startups like Ursa Major are building the future of deterrence—and deterrence apparently needs to travel at thousands of miles per hour and survive temperatures hotter than the average tech CEO’s takes on Twitter.
Every country with a navy, an air force, or even just a particularly enthusiastic engineering club is racing to develop hypersonic systems. The U.S. wants reliable, affordable suppliers who build onshore. Ursa Major is aggressively positioning itself as the answer to the “we need more hypersonic engines and we needed them yesterday” problem.
And honestly? Respect. At least someone in American manufacturing is scaling something other than layoffs.
From Berthoud to the Stratosphere
Ursa Major is headquartered in Berthoud, Colorado—population ~11,000, or roughly the number of VC firms currently pivoting from AI to climate tech to defense tech in a single 12-month cycle. There’s something deeply charming about the idea that one of the country’s leading hypersonics companies is operating out of a quiet Colorado town better known for antique shops and agricultural fairs.
But this is the new defense industrial base: scrappy, distributed, additive-manufacturing-heavy, and determined to out-iterate the bureaucratic sludge of the past.
This raise isn’t about survival. It’s about acceleration. And unlike most startups claiming to “accelerate” something, Ursa Major is accelerating objects that leave the atmosphere.
The Bottom Line
Ursa Major’s $100M Series E isn’t just a fundraising milestone—it’s a signal flare. Defense tech is having its moment. Hardware is back. Manufacturing is sexy again. Hypersonics are the new cloud. And venture capitalists want in on anything that involves real atoms moving at terrifying speeds.
With $150 million in fresh fuel, $115 million in bookings, government customers who pay their bills, and a product roadmap that includes “fly extremely fast things more often,” Ursa Major isn’t slowing down.
In fact, nothing about this company is slowing down. And for once, that’s not just marketing. It's physics.
