Hadrian

Chris Power, an Australian who arrived in Los Angeles convinced that the machine shop was the real bottleneck in American defense production, founded Hadrian in Torrance around 2021 and spent the following years building factories rather than a parts catalog. The company machines precision metal components and assemblies for aerospace, space, missile and shipbuilding programs, and what it actually sells is throughput. Skilled machinists are retiring faster than the trade replaces them, so Hadrian wrote software to carry the knowledge instead. Opus is that software, an operating system for the floor that reads engineering drawings including hand drawn legacy blueprints, generates machine code, schedules work, runs automated inspection and walks technicians through the job. People arriving from nursing or retail are trained to full productivity inside a month.

Three commercial models sit on top of it. Precision components is the plain one, parts made to order in Hadrian's own plants. Manufacturing-as-a-service extends that into managed production programs running at rate. Factories-as-a-service is the newer idea, in which Hadrian installs or operates automated lines inside a customer's own building, an offer aimed squarely at primes holding machine shops they cannot staff. Alongside those sits Atlas, a supply chain platform built on Datum Source, the procurement software firm Hadrian acquired in July 2024, which manages sourcing across a vetted external supplier network from request for proposal through delivery. Hadrian Maritime is the naval arm, covering the specialised welding and inspection that submarine components demand.

The footprint has grown fast. Factory 2 in Torrance has been the main production site since 2022 at roughly 100,000 square feet. Factory 3 opened at Mesa, Arizona in January 2026, a $200 million plant of about 290,000 square feet making components and mission critical systems for aerospace and defense customers, with a software hub attached and more than 350 jobs. Factory 4 followed in March 2026 at Cherokee in the Shoals region of Alabama, some 2.2 million square feet inside a former railcar plant, bigger on its own than everything the company had built before it.

Alabama is where the financial model shows itself. Hadrian committed more than $1.5 billion of private capital to Factory 4 and the Navy added $900 million of non recurring engineering across three sites, inverting the usual order in which government money leads. The plant supplies components for Columbia class and Virginia class submarines, with the Navy describing roughly 80 percent of the work as automated across welding, machining, fabrication, assembly, inspection and test. The Army followed in March 2026 with a contract worth $39.2 million initially and up to $80 million for an automated facility at Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas. Anduril has been a named machining customer since 2023, citing lead time cuts of up to half. A $1.37 billion Series D in August 2026 valued the business at $7.87 billion, with headcount near 700 and a stated goal of 2,000.