Benchmark, the storied Silicon Valley venture firm, has made its first bet on a pure defense startup, leading a $25 million seed round into Furientis at a $125 million valuation. The one-year-old company, whose name means “of fury” in Latin, is on a mission to mass-produce interceptor missiles cheaply — and it has already secured a funded Pentagon contract to build mid-range interceptors, an unusually fast jump from a $5 million pre-seed announced in May to a defense contract in under a year and a half.
The pitch is the arithmetic of scarcity. Exquisite interceptors can cost around $3 million each, and the US Navy receives only 300 to 500 interceptor missiles annually, co-founder Brody Franzen told TechCrunch, compared with China, which he said claims to produce 3,000 anti-ship cruise missiles a month. “We’re being outproduced by a factor of 100 plus,” Franzen said. “That is why we started the company.” Furientis is not trying to match best-in-class performance; it designs its systems to be assembled quickly from readily available components, so each unit costs a fraction of legacy interceptors.
The velocity is the differentiator. The startup has been testing its missiles in the field roughly every two weeks, manufactures prototypes in Los Angeles, and conducts trial launches at White Sands, New Mexico, with a stated goal of eventually producing 1,000 systems a year per factory. Its co-founders bring aerospace pedigree: Franzen was deputy chief engineer at Virgin Galactic before joining hypersonic missile startup Castelion, and Aris Simsarian previously led rocket engine testing at Virgin Orbit. Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta said the team had already completed a dozen launches on the pre-seed round.
The space is crowded. Franzen named Anduril, Castelion and Shield AI as fellow defense startups racing to build mass-produced interceptors, while traditional primes Raytheon and Lockheed Martin scramble to modernize their manufacturing cycles. The defense tech boom that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is four years old now, and the venture money follows a simple logic: startups that can build fast and affordably stand a real chance of landing Pentagon contracts on expedited timelines. Furientis is the test case for whether a one-year-old company can turn that logic into a factory.