New Vista Capital

New Vista Capital is an early-stage aerospace and defense venture firm backing courageous founders forging the future across air, land, sea & space.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

We have said it plainly a few times: the next arsenal of democracy gets built by the teams who treat manufacturing as the product.

This week the Pentagon said it back, its next APFIT round will prioritize technology "that can be made cheaply at scale."

Not the flashiest demo. Not the most exquisite platform. The thing you can actually build, in volume, on time, at a price that fills a deep magazine.

That's deterrence: a magazine deep enough no one dares test it. It's what we back across air, land, sea, and space. If you're building it, our DMs are open.
https://t.co/TH1qTCeaUH

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

The Army's next look at the industrial base isn't a study. It's a race.

Acting Secretary Adam Telle announced at AUSA a Manufacturing Rodeo for early 2027: industrial partners stress the supply chain and manufacturing processes until they show where it breaks. Learn by doing, not by postulating at the Pentagon.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

SDA has 84 Tranche 1 satellites on orbit from three builders. The first bus to fly came from York, not Lockheed or Northrop.

The breakthrough isn't the satellite. It's the buying model: small batches, a set cadence, competition every tranche. That's how new builders get in.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

https://t.co/6Z7FDvBV2K

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Austin just put out its first Deep Tech 50. Eight local VC firms voted, and the companies on it raised more than $10B in the past year.

Proud to back five of them: @allencontrol ,1AU Technologies, @traysartech , @warheadco Bravo Ordnance, and Deterrence.

Counter-drone turrets, photonics, underground breaching, warheads, and munitions automation. Austin builds the hard stuff now.

Congrats to all 50.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital just offered Wolfspeed up to $1.5B on a 30-year term (conditional). @DoWCTO
@wcooper19

That's money no venture fund can write, aimed at silicon carbide and gallium nitride, the materials under EW systems and rad-hard space parts.

Venture funds the systems. Someone has to fund the wafers.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Benchmark's first pure defense investment is a seed round into a one-year-old interceptor company. That's the signal.

@Furientis is designing interceptors to be built 1,000 per factory per year, from readily available parts. The shortage was never about how good our best missiles are. It's about how few of them we can make.

Congrats @brody_franzen and the team.

[Brody Franzen 🇺🇸 🚀 @brody_franzen]

Excited to announce @Furientis @DeptofWar OTA contract for 100mi interceptor and $25M Seed raise led by @benchmark!

This couldn't have happened w/o our incredible engineering team testing at industry best pace. Join us- we're hiring across all disciplines!
https://t.co/ankNypRwAG

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

America has 16,876 machine shops. 83% employ fewer than 20 people. (2022 Economic Census, via @a16z)

Every missile, drone, and rocket coming off a prototype line runs through those shops. A production ramp moves at the pace of its smallest supplier.

Founders fixing this bottle neck are building defense companies too.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

The Army just picked five companies to build Precision Strike Missile Increment 4. @Castelion is one of them.

The other four: Anduril, Mach Industries, Lockheed Martin, RTX.

The requirement: 1,000 kilometers or more, launched off a HIMARS, against targets that are moving, at sea, and on land. Roughly double the range of the baseline missile.

Four years ago Castelion didn't exist. Today it's developing a strategic-range strike weapon on the same program line as the two biggest missile houses on earth with a competitive fly-off in FY27 to decide who advances.

That's the whole argument. Not that new companies deserve a seat, that they earn one in a fly-off.

Congratulations @hargsb and the Castelion team. Proud to be behind you.

https://t.co/1XUQnNXes5

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Huge congrats @SwarmAero for the unveiling of Gamera!

The Air Force needs an MQ-9 successor under $10M a unit, at rate, by 2031. Every requirement in that sentence is a manufacturing requirement.

Production is the product. Proud to back the team that started there.

[Swarm Aero @SwarmAero]

Meet Gamera, a new category of Group 5 strike and sensing UAS that we unveiled at @AFA_Air_Space's Air, Space & Cyber Conference today.

Mass-producible, significantly lower cost than legacy platforms, and the first UAS specifically designed to employ bomber-class strike munitions such as LRASM/JASSM-ER, Gamera delivers all of the capabilities needed in the next generation of UAS, at 10X lower cost-per-effect than legacy approaches to strike. With over 9,000 nautical miles of unrefueled range, Gamera's unique combination of low cost, large payload, and long range does not exist in any other UAS.

Since 2022, Swarm has been designing and building Gamera to provide the low-cost persistent strike and sensing that the @usairforce's Massed Modular Aircraft program is now seeking, making the force more capable, survivable, and effective, and renewing U.S. dominance of the skies.

Read our announcement here: https://t.co/Lw6UyL5T3s

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Twenty-five years.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001. We honor those who lost their lives.

Never forget.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

The Pentagon's industrial base chief testified last week that there are 400,000 unfilled skilled-trade jobs in the defense industrial base right now. In ten years it could be 2.5 million.

Not a funding gap. Not a facilities gap. Welders.

Every reindustrialization plan assumes someone shows up to run the line. Capital found this sector two years ago; capacity is being appropriated. Neither one bends metal.

The next generation of submarine builders and welders is in middle school right now. That's the real lead time.
https://t.co/AUoIrsIeWW

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

@AtomsNotBits Needed

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

The commander of DCMA's experimental unmanned systems command published a warning this week that cuts against the consensus: buy 100,000 drones at $1,000 each, warehouse them, and the countermeasure may arrive before you've emptied the shelf. His phrase for it "stockpiling obsolescence."

He's right. And the conclusion isn't "buy fewer."

It's that the thing worth stockpiling was never the drone.

Attritable mass is a claim about a production system how fast it redesigns, requalifies, and reruns not about a warehouse. A cheap unit built on a line that can't change is expensive. A pricier unit on a line that turns in weeks is cheap.

Which is why we back the manufacturing layer and not just the airframe: the machines that make energetics, the suppliers that make the components, the lines that can be retooled without being rebuilt.

Adaptation rate is a weapon. You can't buy it in bulk you have to own the capacity to produce it.
https://t.co/njQ9QHPNQI

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Japan just requested a record $55.6B defense budget its 15th consecutive increase. Standoff missiles, drones, AI, underwater hypersonics, and for the first time, a dedicated anti-radiation missile.

Everyone will read that as "an ally is rearming." Read it as a demand signal instead.

Because it lands on the same production base as ours. The US, Europe and Japan are now queuing for the same solid rocket motors, the same seekers, the same energetics lines sized for a peacetime that ended.

A budget line is not a magazine. Record demand against fixed supply doesn't make deterrence. It makes a waitlist.

The thing worth building is the other end of that queue. Capacity that can absorb allied demand and ours, at rate, without a decade of lead time.

That's not a policy problem. It's a manufacturing problem, and it's the one we spend our time on.
https://t.co/nvmEjd3qLn

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Congratulations to @hargsb and the @Castelion team! The Navy just put $89.9M firm-fixed-price behind Blackbeard, 50 Early Operational Capability weapons and transition to a Program of Record, EOC by 2028. From funding story a few days ago to a production one now. Proud to see it!

[Castelion @Castelion]

The @USNavy has awarded Castelion an $89,997,162 firm-fixed-price order to advance Blackbeard to an Early Operational Capability and accelerate design features to enable export. We appreciate the Navy's continued trust in our team to deliver. Read more: https://t.co/wYoQJgMUMZ

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

60% less fuel. 36 hours of silent operation. Runs off the generators, solar, and vehicles already in the formation no new training, no Chinese parts in the supply chain.

Loud diesel generators give away your position. Power is a survivability problem. Congrats @AdamWarmoth and the team. Proud to back them!

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Every capability we talk about whether it be drones, EW, edge compute, is a load on a power budget nobody planned for. Today a squad leader decides which systems stay on.

@chariotdefense just won a $7.6M DIU contract to fix that. Amphora ships to Army brigades this fall. First stop: the Arctic.
https://t.co/UMfq4SXLhA

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Happy Monday! If you're pre-seed or seed and building something hard that actually matters across defense, space, energy, critical minerals, robotics, reindustrialization, anything at the edge of national security, we want to talk.

We back founders going after the improbable who have the grit to see it through.

DMs are open. Come find us.

[New Vista Capital @NewVistaCap]

Congrats to the @Starcloud_ team and @PhilipJohnston! $250M more in the bank at a $2.3B valuation, with Nvidia among the backers.

When the company that defines the AI hardware era puts its own money behind GPUs in orbit, it isn't backing a startup. It's betting the next data-center layer gets built above the atmosphere.

Terrestrial compute is running out of power, land, and water. Orbit isn't. Proud to back the team building it!

[Starcloud @Starcloud_]

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