Castelion

Castelion was started in November 2022 by three SpaceX veterans, Bryon Hargis as chief executive, Sean Pitt as chief operating officer and Andrew Kreitz as chief financial officer, around an argument the American munitions base had stopped hearing. Build cheap, fly early, fly often, and let flight data rather than review boards drive the design. The company ran more than twenty development flights in 2025 alone, and its first hypersonic vehicle test took place in the Mojave Desert in March of that year. Investors have followed the test cadence closely. A $100 million Series A led by Lightspeed closed in January 2025, a $350 million Series B co-led by Altimeter Capital and Lightspeed followed in December, and in August 2026 a $1 billion Series C anchored by JPMorganChase Strategic Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz and Carlyle valued the business at $13 billion.

Blackbeard is the product. It is a hypersonic strike missile designed for mass production and a unit price far below the legacy programs it competes with, and the ground launched variant, Blackbeard GL, fits inside existing High Mobility Artillery Rocket System pods so an Army battery can shoot it from an M142 launcher without new equipment. The Army has been the early sponsor, putting $25 million in its fiscal 2026 budget behind the HX3 effort and asking for a proof of concept demonstration in early 2026 and ten prototype rounds for flight testing after that. Service officials have described the target as roughly 80 percent of the capability of a Precision Strike Missile Increment 4 at a small fraction of the price.

The Navy came next. Blackbeard was named the first weapon candidate under the Multi mission Affordable Capacity Effector program, and in February 2026 the service awarded almost $50 million in firm fixed price work at Torrance to carry the missile from prototype to an early operational capability by late 2027. A follow on order covered the first fifty rounds together with shipping and storage containers, and a further award in April 2026 funded integration onto the F/A-18. Castelion builds nearly all of it in house. Solid rocket motors, propellant, warhead design and integration, avionics, flight software, guidance, navigation and control, flight termination systems, radar and radio frequency hardware and the manufacturing automation that ties the factory together are all internal rather than bought from the traditional supply base.

Facilities follow the same logic. Engineering and manufacturing sit at Torrance in Los Angeles County, with electronics work at Allen, Texas, rocket motor and research operations at Midland, Texas, a large site at Rio Rancho, New Mexico and a customer facing office in Washington. The centerpiece is Project Ranger, a 1,000 acre motor production and final assembly campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico funded with $220 million of the company's own capital, which Castelion says will become the largest dedicated hypersonic production site in the country and turn out thousands of missiles a year. Longer range strike weapons and defensive systems are the stated next products.