Furientis has raised $25 million in seed funding led by Benchmark and secured its first funded government contract, supporting development of a 100-mile-range interceptor vehicle intended for homeland defense.
Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta is joining the company’s Board in connection with the financing.
The government contract is structured as a prototyping Other Transaction Agreement with the Department of War.
The financial value of the government award was not disclosed.
Under the agreement, Furientis will continue developing its interceptor and demonstrate the flight vehicle’s performance against Department requirements.
The Los Angeles-based defense technology company is focused on producing lower-cost defensive interceptors at significantly greater volumes than traditional missile production programs.
Furientis is designing its system around manufacturability from the beginning rather than optimizing only for maximum technical performance and then addressing production requirements later.
The company evaluates components based in part on whether they can be manufactured at a rate supporting 1,000 interceptor vehicles annually per factory.
Furientis is also targeting a final assembly process requiring less than one hour per interceptor.
Where appropriate, the company uses commercial off-the-shelf components rather than automatically specifying aerospace or military-grade parts.
It also manufactures important components internally, including solid rocket motors and seekers.
Furientis tests prototypes in the field on a roughly biweekly cadence, allowing the company to modify designs based on flight data rather than waiting through long conceptual development cycles.
The seed financing and government contract will support additional investment in vertically integrated manufacturing, expanded flight-test operations and hiring across engineering and manufacturing at the company’s Los Angeles operation.
Furientis was founded by Brody Franzen and Aris Simsarian.
KEY QUOTES:
“Furientis exists to resupply our critical deficiency in defensive munitions. Recent events have shown these threats are not theoretical, and the U.S. is genuinely running low on the systems that protect the American people. That is fundamentally a production and manufacturing problem, and it’s the one we built this company to solve.”
Brody Franzen, Co-Founder and CEO of Furientis
“Furientis is building truly remarkable technology with the aim of creating a platform that can scale rapidly with the lowest cost in the world. The team is comprised of some of the most talented propulsion, hardware, and software engineers in the world.”
Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark
