🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, Los Angeles.

Space may not have roads, but it still has a transportation problem.

Rockets have become remarkably good at carrying satellites beyond Earth. Once those satellites reach space, however, getting them from one orbit to another can still be slow, expensive or impossible.

Redondo Beach-based Impulse Space wants to change that, and investors are giving it considerably more fuel for the journey.

The company raised a $308M extension to its Series D, bringing the round’s total to $808M. The new financing comes just over three months after Impulse announced the initial $500M raise and pushes its total capital raised above $1.3B.

Existing investors 137 Ventures, BANNER VC, DFJ Growth, Linse Capital, Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners participated in the extension. Impulse did not disclose a valuation, but convincing existing backers to commit another $308M so soon after an already substantial round is a strong signal of confidence in both the company and the market it is pursuing.

Founded by former SpaceX propulsion executive Tom Mueller, Impulse is building vehicles designed to move satellites and payloads after they have already reached space. If rockets are responsible for getting cargo off the ground, Impulse wants to handle what happens after delivery.

Impulse Space

Its Mira spacecraft is built for precise maneuvering, payload deployment and proximity operations in orbit. Helios, scheduled for its first flight in 2027, is a high-energy kick stage designed to move payloads from low Earth orbit to destinations such as geostationary orbit in less than a day. The company has also introduced an electric propulsion system called Electra and a rideshare service aimed at making higher-energy orbits more accessible.

Together, those products represent something larger than a collection of spacecraft. Impulse is attempting to build a transportation network for an economy that increasingly needs one.

That need is becoming harder to ignore. More satellites are reaching orbit, governments are prioritizing responsive space capabilities and commercial operators want greater flexibility after launch. A satellite that can change position, reach a different orbit or respond quickly to a new mission is significantly more useful than one permanently tied to its original destination.

The U.S. government is already putting Impulse’s thesis to work. Helios was selected for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program, making it the first upper-stage prime awarded a position in the program. Impulse also received a $28M contract extension to provide two Mira spacecraft for additional Space Systems Command missions.

The company says its headcount has more than doubled over the past year as it expanded its facilities in Redondo Beach, Mojave, Boulder and Washington, D.C. The new capital will support further hiring, product development and facility growth as Impulse works to serve commercial, civil and defense customers.

It also recently appointed its first chief financial officer, Adam Townsend, who previously helped guide Vizio through an IPO and its eventual sale to Walmart. The hire is another sign that Impulse is preparing for a more complex chapter, one defined not only by engineering milestones but also by a growing capital base, government contracts and large-scale operations.

That is where this announcement becomes more interesting than its considerable price tag.

Impulse has already shown that Mira can operate in space. Now it must prove that it can turn several ambitious vehicles into dependable infrastructure. The difference between a promising spacecraft company and a transportation network is repetition: more missions, more customers and systems that work reliably enough to become part of how the space economy operates.

An $808M round gives Impulse the resources to pursue that vision. It also raises the expectations attached to it.

For Southern California, the financing reinforces the region’s role in the new space economy. Los Angeles helped build the original aerospace industry, and a new generation of companies is now developing the vehicles, factories and infrastructure intended to support life beyond the launchpad.

Impulse Space is tackling what may be the next big bottleneck. Getting to space is only the beginning.

Someone still has to get you where you are going.

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🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, LA.

The largest checks in tech are increasingly going toward companies trying to build their way out of America’s biggest physical constraints.

This week, two Los Angeles startups raised a combined $2.37 billion in equity to tackle two particularly urgent ones: how the country manufactures critical hardware and where it will find enough electricity to power the AI era.

Torrance-based Hadrian is building highly automated factories for defense and aerospace. El Segundo’s Valar Atomics wants to manufacture nuclear reactors at scale. Different industries, same underlying bet: the next generation of technology will depend on our ability to produce physical infrastructure much faster than we do today.

Hadrian raised $1.37 billion in Series D funding, bringing its valuation to $7.87 billion. The company plans to use the capital to open new factories, expand research and development, and increase its capacity to produce critical defense, aerospace and industrial systems.

Hadrian’s pitch is straightforward, if wildly ambitious: America needs to relearn how to build things and build them quickly.

Its factories combine skilled workers with AI, robotics and proprietary software to manufacture precision components and, increasingly, complete mission-critical systems. Its customers include defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and RTX, along with newer players like Anduril.

The company has come a long way from simply making aerospace parts. Hadrian is positioning itself as a piece of America’s industrial infrastructure, offering manufacturers a way to rapidly scale domestic production at a time when wars abroad, strained supply chains and growing defense demands have made the country’s manufacturing gaps increasingly difficult to ignore.

Investors are clearly buying the argument. The new round comes just over a year after Hadrian raised $260 million, suggesting that “reindustrialization” has officially graduated from venture capital buzzword to billion-dollar investment thesis.

Meanwhile, roughly 15 miles away in El Segundo, Valar Atomics is moving even faster than its enormous ambitions suggested.

When we last wrote about Valar, the company was reportedly raising $450 million at a $2 billion valuation and racing to prove that nuclear energy could move on AI’s timetable. Now, it has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, secured an additional $200 million credit facility and reportedly reached a $6 billion valuation.

Valar is developing standardized, factory-built nuclear power plants designed to avoid the enormous costs and decades-long construction timelines associated with traditional nuclear projects. Its goal is not merely to build a working reactor, but to eventually manufacture fleets of them.

That ambition also sounds considerably less theoretical than it did when we first covered the company. In June, Valar’s Ward 250 reactor achieved a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Just one week later, the company demonstrated the reactor generating electricity to power an Nvidia Blackwell system. Valar now says the new funding will help it move from proving its technology works to producing reactors at scale.

The timing is no coincidence. AI’s enormous appetite for electricity is forcing the tech industry to confront a basic reality: the cloud still has to plug into something. Training models and operating massive data centers will require far more reliable power, and nuclear energy is rapidly becoming one of Silicon Valley’s favorite answers.

Hadrian and Valar may be solving different problems, but their unusually large rounds point to the same shift. AI can design, predict and automate, but it cannot manufacture a missile component or generate a megawatt of electricity on its own. That requires factories, energy systems, supply chains and a great deal of capital.

For years, venture-backed companies competed to build the software layer. Now, some of the biggest bets are being placed on the infrastructure underneath it.

The future may run on AI. But first, someone has to build what keeps it running.

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Hello, Hello.

This week, one of LA’s most recognizable consumer brands packed its biggest bag yet.

Samsonite Group has agreed to acquire an 85% stake in BÉIS for $178.5M, valuing the Los Angeles-based travel and lifestyle brand at approximately $210M. The deal is expected to close in Q4, pending regulatory approval.

Founded by actress and entrepreneur Shay Mitchell and incubated by LA-based Beach House Group in 2018, BÉIS has grown from a digitally native luggage startup into a profitable business that generated approximately $210M in sales last year. Along the way, it built the kind of fiercely loyal online following that legacy brands spend years and considerable marketing budgets trying to manufacture.

Image Source: BÉIS

That may be the most interesting part of this deal. Samsonite is not simply acquiring another luggage line. It is buying access to a younger, predominantly female customer base, a sophisticated direct-to-consumer operation and a brand that knows how to turn social media attention into actual sales. The suitcases are useful; the cultural relevance is the real carry-on.

BÉIS will continue operating as a standalone brand under CEO Adeela Hussain Johnson and its existing management team. Mitchell will retain a 15% ownership stake and continue guiding the company’s creative and product vision, while Samsonite brings the global distribution, sourcing and logistics infrastructure needed to take the brand further.

For LA’s startup community, the acquisition is another reminder that valuable technology companies do not always look like software companies. BÉIS built its advantage through digital distribution, community and an unusually sharp understanding of its customer. Now, one of the world’s largest luggage companies wants what it created.

Sometimes the strongest exit starts with knowing exactly what people want to pack.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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