Hypersonica raises €100M Series B, targets operational systems by 2029
Hypersonica's €100M Series B, co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst, lands nine months after its Series A, with a 2029 target.
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Founded 2023 · Wessling, Germany
Hypersonica, the British-German defense startup headquartered in Munich, announced a €100 million Series B on 2 November 2026, co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst, to speed up development and testing of the hypersonic deep-strike systems it aims to make operational by 2029.
Below, I lay out the round, the company, the market around it and the pattern it fits.
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€100 million, nine months after the Series A
Hypersonica published the Series B announcement on its own site on 2 November 2026, with a Munich and London dateline, and Tech.eu reported it the same day. The amount is €100 million. Lightspeed and General Catalyst co-led. Plural, 201 Ventures and SPRIND, Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, came back in as continuing investors. No valuation was disclosed.
According to the company, the money goes to accelerating development of its deep-strike systems, increasing its testing cadence, expanding operations and reindustrialization across Europe, and creating hundreds of engineering and manufacturing jobs in the UK and Germany. It gave no headcount and says its engineering team has grown since February.
That February was the Series A: about €23 million, led by Plural with General Catalyst and 201 Ventures, according to Tech.eu. General Catalyst went from participant to co-lead in under a year.
Dr Philipp Kerth and Dr Marc Ewenz put their thesis in one line in the announcement: “The debate about whether Europe needs hypersonic deep-strike capability is over.” Alexander Schmitt (Partner, Lightspeed) said in the same release: “Hypersonica is redefining how advanced defence capability gets built.”
Two founders, one Mach 6 flight and a 2029 target
Kerth (CEO) and Ewenz (CTO) founded the company in 2023, according to Tech.eu, which describes it as British-German, headquartered in Munich with a London subsidiary. The company record sits on our Hypersonica profile.
The test result behind this round came in February. The company says its HS-1 prototype exceeded Mach 6 over more than 300 km, which it describes as a first for a privately funded European defense company. It also claims a development model that cuts costs by more than 80 percent compared with conventional approaches. Both figures come from the company.
The stated goal is operational hypersonic deep-strike systems by 2029, per the company, with a range above 2,000 km according to Tech.eu.
$7.4 billion in 2026, mostly in seven checks
No reliable sizing exists for this segment, and no growth rate has been published for European hypersonic strike either. The closest measurable proxy is venture money going into European defense tech.
Dealroom and Resilience Media’s “State of Defence Tech 2026”, published on 5 October 2026 and reported by Tech.eu, puts European defense tech VC at a record $7.4 billion in 2026 to date, against $2.6 billion in 2025, nearly three times as much. Seven rounds of $1 billion or more (Anduril, Helsing, Saronic, Shield AI, Quantum Systems, ICEYE and Castelion) account for over 85 percent of the 2026 total, according to the same report.
The geography is even tighter. Germany took $3.5 billion in 2026, the report says, and Munich hosts 4.1 percent of Europe’s VC-backed defense startups while drawing 40 percent of European defense VC funding this year. We’re a continent used to spreading its bets across capitals, and this category has settled on one Bavarian city.
Hypersonica adds €100 million to the Munich column.
Public budgets arrive before the purchase orders
The announcement names no customer contracts, and the demand it cites comes from public budgets. The UK Defence Investment Plan allocates an initial £770 million over four years to the UK-German Deep Precision Strike program under the Trinity House Agreement, according to the company’s release. The same release cites a NATO-led multinational initiative, announced in July, that envisages £37 billion of deep precision strike investment over the next decade.
The pattern I keep seeing in our European fundraising data this fall is defense rounds closing at every size, with production written into the use of funds wherever it is stated. Tekever’s Series D, $580 million as announced (€498 million in our records) on 23 September 2026, was co-led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford at a $6.4 billion valuation. At the smaller end, Beyond Vision raised €28 million in a round dated 22 October 2026 in our records, led by Indico Capital Partners and Lince Capital, for drone production in Portugal. Hypersonica’s own list mentions reindustrialization and manufacturing jobs in two countries.
The good news is that the European pieces now sit in a single company: a German public agency on the cap table, a UK budget line, a NATO-level envelope and two large venture firms writing the lead checks. The open variable is the customer. Until a contract is named, this round prices a policy commitment and a February test result.
Watching for the first named customer
Imagine if the first operational system in this category came from a company founded in 2023 that raised its Series A in February 2026. That is the scenario this round’s investors have now underwritten with €100 million.
Will the first named contract land before the 2029 target? The next reported test and the hiring in the UK and Germany will show the pace long before that date. For the people building Europe’s defense supply chain in Munich, London and beyond, those jobs are the signal to watch first. Let’s see who builds the factories!
