There’s raising money, and then there’s strapping a rocket to your business and punching through the stratosphere. Firehawk Aerospace just closed a $60 million oversubscribed Series C led by 1789 Capital, with Presto Tech Horizons, Draper Associates, Decisive Point, Stellar Ventures, and a crew of seasoned investors loading in. This isn’t a round, it’s propulsion.
Since 2019, Will Edwards, Steve Edwards, and Ronald Jones have been building something more than a defense startup. Out of Addison, Texas, with a 340-acre production facility in Lawton, Oklahoma, two test sites spread across 30 square miles in West Texas, and even an office in Melbourne, Florida, Firehawk is scaling like a defense contractor, not a fresh-faced disruptor. Add in a European partnership with CSG via Presto Tech Horizons, and you start to see a supply chain strategy that feels less like theory and more like mobilization.
The tech is where the spark hits powder. Firehawk’s proprietary 3D-printed thermoplastic propellant takes the months-long cast-and-cure process and compresses it into hours. That’s not efficiency, it’s reprogramming the timeline. More than 58 hot fire tests completed, one hybrid flight test already flown, and production times cut by 99 percent. Five U.S. utility patents anchor the IP. Safety gets a boost with zero TNT equivalency, while mobile manufacturing makes the model scalable across geographies. In a field built on legacy methods, Firehawk isn’t tinkering, they’re detonating the status quo.
The U.S. government is paying attention. In the last two months alone, Firehawk landed a $4.9 million contract from the Air Force Test Center and a $4 million TACFI contract from AFWERX, alongside Phase II work with the Air Force Research Laboratory. That’s validation written in appropriations, not press releases.
The leadership roster reads like a playbook built for execution. Will Edwards, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, brings the vision and velocity. Ronald Jones, Chairman and Chief Scientist, supplies decades of aerospace depth. Michael Stark adds 35 years of aerospace leadership as President. Ben Allen commands the financial strategy. David Howe, with experience at Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, leads engineering. Mark Schell brings decades of legal expertise from the energy sector. This is a team stacked with operators, not placeholders.
So what does $60 million buy? A 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Oklahoma. Expansion into European markets. Reinforced allied defense supply chains at a moment when resiliency is more than a buzzword, it’s policy.
The bigger signal is this: Firehawk is proving additive manufacturing isn’t a side project. It’s a scalable, defensible, and safer pathway to propulsion systems that can be produced faster than the old guard ever imagined. In an industry where time is leverage, Firehawk Aerospace just showed how to bend it.
