Torrance's Castelion Raised $1 Billion for Missiles. New Mexico Gets the Plant.

The company's Blackbeard hypersonic strike missile was designed in California and is expected to enter service in 2027.

A defense company in Torrance, in the South Bay, says it has raised $1 billion to build hypersonic missiles in volume, in a round that values it at $13 billion. Castelion's Series C was reported by the Los Angeles tech outlet dot.LA.

The factory money is leaving the South Bay. Expanding the plant at Project Ranger — a 1,000-acre production campus in New Mexico — takes hundreds of millions of dollars of the new capital, dot.LA reported. Blackbeard, the low-cost hypersonic strike missile Castelion wants to turn out at scale, was drawn up in California and will be assembled there.

The financing isn't all equity. It's $800 million in equity plus a $250 million revolving credit facility, according to the outlet, which called it one of the largest recent raises by a defense technology company in Los Angeles.

Three firms co-led it: JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz and Carlyle. Interlagos Capital, based in Los Angeles, also took part, alongside Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lavrock Ventures, Altimeter, General Catalyst and T. Rowe Price.

Beyond the Blackbeard ramp, the company says the money goes to a longer-range precision weapon and to new defensive systems. It hasn't put a price on either program.

The customer list is the part that matters here, and it's mostly a number. Castelion says it has booked more than $500 million in U.S. military contracts over the past 18 months, dot.LA reported. The buying agencies, the contract vehicles and the periods of performance behind that figure haven't been named.

The pitch underneath the round is speed. Castelion says Blackbeard went from a blank sheet to an official program in under four years, borrowing the fast-testing, build-it-in-house method commercial space companies made familiar. A $13 billion valuation prices it as a fixture of the American defense industrial base rather than a startup with a good prototype, and the gap between those two things is a factory floor in New Mexico.

Blackbeard is expected to enter service in 2027.

Source: dot.la, retrieved September 6, 2026.