Inside The Stealthy European Defense Tech Startup Raising $100 Million
Defense tech startup Cambridge Aerospace has already raised multiple funding rounds and is working on several interceptor missile lines. Upstarts takes you inside its ongoing raise and plans.
The Upshot
There’s a new startup in Europe that, while trying to keep a low profile, has been out raising one of the region’s biggest funding rounds.
It’s not another AI shop. Unless you’re an insider who’s looked at investing, or are deep in the right circles, you’ve probably never heard of it. But it’s intrigued Upstarts for a few weeks now, and that’s before something bizarre happened that was a first for us in 15 years of reporting on startups.
The company is Cambridge Aerospace, a nine-month-old U.K.-based startup, and it’s raising large sums of capital to build a new defense company aiming to better protect European countries from the rising threat posed in modern warfare by drones and missiles.
Cambridge Aerospace’s already testing a first product, called the Skyhammer, to do so; it’s currently raising $100 million from venture capitalists at a valuation of about $400 million.
Those are the basics, but the story is much more interesting – and strange. First, there’s the video. Upstarts had been chasing information on Cambridge for a while when Bloomberg published those bare basics, describing Cambridge Aerospace as “Iron Dome-like tech,” in reference to Israel’s air defense system, in an article last week.
Bloomberg found U.K. filings that named Cambridge’s board – two of its cofounders, Steven Barrett and Chris Sylvan, as well as several investors – and the bare details on the current raise and Skyhammer’s existence. Maybe you saw that story; a lot of people didn’t notice. End of transmission on Cambridge, seemingly, for now.
Except through a tipster, Upstarts noticed that an entire video recording of a presentation and Q&A between Barrett and some prospective investors, dated to earlier this month, was sitting publicly available on Vimeo. We’ve never encountered a situation like that before, where a buzzy stealth startup’s funding round is explained, for anyone looking to watch, on a popular video streaming site.
It’s a PR person’s worst nightmare, and Upstarts won’t name and shame the investor we believe may have accidentally uploaded it to the web for a few days (they didn’t respond to Upstarts inquiries). But we watched. Add that to the other documents and conversations with several sources, and Upstarts can provide the first detailed look at who Cambridge is and what it’s building.
We have more info on Skyhammer, as well as additional products previously unreported including Starhammer, Nightstar and Looking Glass.
We have more info on its investor composition, including unannounced pre-seed and seed rounds, and the key players involved. And we can take a first look at how Cambridge would fit in alongside Anduril and Helsing, and what it means for the wider startup community.
Investors Accel and Lakestar declined to comment, and Lux Capital didn’t respond. Cambridge Aerospace provided a statement from CEO Steven Barrett reprinted in full below.