Hypersonica Raises a EUR 100 Million Series B for ITAR-Free Hypersonic Deep-Strike Systems by 2029
Munich, 2 November 2026
Key points
- Hypersonica, a British-German company headquartered in Munich with a London subsidiary, announced on 2 November a EUR 100 million Series B co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst, with existing investors including Plural, 201 Ventures and SPRIND, Germany's Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation
- The round follows a Series A of about EUR 23 million in February, led by Plural; no valuation was disclosed
- The company aims to develop hypersonic deep-strike systems by 2029, "travelling at Mach 5 or faster with increased manoeuvrability", which it describes as sovereign and free of US ITAR export controls
- Its HS-1, which the company calls a hypersonic ballistic missile prototype, flew from Andøya Space in Norway in February and, by its account, exceeded Mach 6 over more than 300 km
Two US venture investors have put EUR 100 million behind a European start-up that has flown one ballistic prototype and aims to field a manoeuvring hypersonic strike weapon in three years.
Hypersonica says the money will raise its testing cadence, expand operations across Europe and create hundreds of engineering and manufacturing jobs in the UK and Germany. Its release places the company against the UK–German Trinity House Agreement and cites the UK Defence Investment Plan's initial GBP 770 million over four years for the two countries' Deep Precision Strike programme; it names no contract under it. It also claims a development model that costs more than 80 per cent less than conventional approaches, without saying against what. In May the Financial Times named Hypersonica, with MBDA, among the companies in the British–German talks on a conventional strike programme, as Signal No. 66 reported.
The 2029 date is for a manoeuvring weapon; what has flown is a ballistic one. By the company's own description, the systems it aims to field add manoeuvrability to the speed HS-1 showed, and manoeuvre is what it says will let them beat existing missile defences. That is the hard part of hypersonic flight, and it is still ahead. Berlin's own planning, as reported in June, put a UK-partnered hypersonic glide vehicle at the end of a four-track deep-strike plan, for 2035; Hypersonica's date is six years earlier than the government's. The round, which Signal No. 180 carried, pays for flights. It does not supply a customer: the gap between the two dates closes only when Berlin or London contracts a manoeuvring vehicle, and the release names no such contract.
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