The exterior of the company’s factory in Hawthorne, California.
Hadrian
Machine parts start-up Hadrian Automation has raised $90 million in a new round of funding led by venture firms Lux Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as the company works to build largely automated factories to power the aerospace supply chain to transform space travel.
“We created Factory #1 and proved we could produce space and defense parts 10 times faster and more efficiently than anyone else,” Chris Power, Hadrian’s founder and CEO, told CNBC.
The fundraiser marks Hadrian’s second round of funding. Other investors in the round included Lachy Groom, Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, Construct Capital and 137 Ventures. Power declined to give Hadrian’s exact valuation after the raise, but said it’s between $200 million and $1 billion.
Los Angeles-based Hadrian also adds Brandon Reeves, partner at Lux Capital, and Katherine Boyle, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to the firm’s board of directors. Boyle said Hadrian’s ability to scale his approach was a key reason for Andreessen Horowitz’s investment.
“The rate at which they were able to build factories was just extraordinary,” Boyle told CNBC.
Some of Hadrian’s new funds will go toward building Factory #2, which is planned at nearly 100,000 square feet in Torrance, Calif., near its current Hawthorne facility, said Power, the CEO. The Company intends to open the Torrance factory by August while continuing to rapidly recruit. Hadrian, which had six employees less than a year ago and 40 today, expects to have about 120 employees by the end of this year, Power added.
Hadrian has three clients. Power didn’t disclose the companies, but said its current customers build all of the rockets and satellites that Hadrian makes aluminum components for. The company intends to expand its range of components to include steels and other hard metals in the near future.
“We’re not setting up factories that are like assembly lines — we’re building an abstract factory where you can put any part in and it’ll come out the other side… as long as it fits a certain size or material that we support.” , we can do anything with it,” Power said.
The problem of the manufacturing supply chain
A look inside the company’s factory in Hawthorne, California.
Hadrian
Hadrian is attempting to centralize a supply chain that is fragmented among suppliers spread across the country. Citing her firm’s experience investing in aerospace and defense companies, Boyle added that the current supply chain depends on “thousands of mom-and-pop shops” across the country. Hardware and aerospace companies often complain about this, she said.
Power estimates that there are about 3,000 of these small machine shops, which collectively generate about $40 billion in revenue annually by manufacturing high-precision components for aerospace and defense contractors.
Josh Wolfe, a partner at Lux Capital, further emphasized that these components “are not proprietary” but vary widely in demand, from “custom made” parts to “high volume”.
Up to 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled by 2030, according to a study published last year by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. In addition, the average age of machinists is rising, Boyle said, a major contributing factor to the labor shortage.
“The median age of many machinists is now in their mid-50s, and many are getting to that point where they’re retiring or handing over the business to the next generation,” Boyle said. “The question then becomes: who will take over these businesses and who will be able to continue to supply the defense industrial base?”
Boyle added that a secondary theme in the machining job market is that Hadrian’s approach to automation is “creating jobs for a new generation of machinists.”
“There are labor shortages in high-skill jobs,” Boyle said.
Hadrian is tackling this with an approach that allows the company to hire workers as machinists “who have never made a part before,” Power said. He gave examples of hires Hadrian made at Chick-Fil-A or Walmart with no prior experience making parts.
“We’re getting to a point where they’re making space hardware within 30 days of joining Hadrian,” Power said.
Hadrian brings these freshly minted machinists together with those who have extensive experience in the field or in the software and have hired talent from the likes of Meta, Stripe, SpaceX and others.