The first question Jack Oswald asks visitors to Singularity's Los Angeles facility is not about interceptors. It is about manufacturing throughput. How many units can you build per shift. That question is the company's founding premise, not a technical specification. The West has a volume problem, not a design problem.
The company emerged from stealth on July 14 with an oversubscribed $80 million Series A at a $400 million valuation, backed by a syndicate that spans Khosla Ventures, Felicis, NEA, AE Ventures, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, and five other institutional investors. The round is the largest known seed-to-Series-A in the counter-drone segment and the most explicit venture bet yet that manufacturing, not missile technology, is the binding constraint on Western air defence.
Series A
Led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis with 12 institutional co-investors · Axios, July 2026
The company has been building and flight-testing air defence systems in near-total secrecy for two years. Oswald, whose background includes SpaceX and multiple defence-technology exits, and COO Shail Giroux have assembled a team drawn from SpaceX, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and the automotive sector. The manufacturing team, recruited primarily from Tesla and Toyota, is building an assembly line based on automotive principles, not the batch-production model that has kept interceptor costs high and volumes low for decades.
The technical thesis is exact. It builds a missile-based, ground-launched interceptor with all key subsystems including the solid-fuel rocket motor developed in-house. This vertical-integration decision is rare in the defence industry, where most prime contractors source motors, seekers, and airframes from separate supply chains, each adding margin and lead time. By controlling the full subsystem stack, it can iterate on hardware changes within weeks instead of the quarterly cadence typical of prime-contractor programmes. The company conducts multiple flight tests per month, a pace Sven Strohband of Khosla Ventures describes as the most aggressive test cadence in the industry.
The Economic Duel
The market it targets has a precise arithmetic. A Shahed-136 loitering munition costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to manufacture. The U.S. Army's existing interceptors, such as Patriot PAC-3 and NASAMS AMRAAM, cost between $1 million and $4 million per shot. That ratio is not sustainable when adversaries produce drones on assembly lines that compete with automobile production volumes.
The Army's own Low-Cost Interceptor programme, launched at an industry day in June 2026, explicitly targets sub-$1 million per-shot interceptors. Perennial Autonomy won a three-year, $500 million contract from the Pentagon's JIATF-401 task force in May 2026 for its Merops drone interceptor at roughly $15,000 per unit. AeroVironment received a separate $500 million JIATF-401 contract on July 6, eight days before Singularity's announcement, for directed-energy and counter-UAS platforms.
Singularity enters a crowded segment, but with a differentiated approach. Unlike Perennial's propeller-driven Merops, its missile-based interceptor can engage faster turbojet threats, including the Geran-3 and Geran-5 variants now deployed, that outrun drone-on-drone interceptors. Unlike the Army's LCI programme, it owns its entire production chain in-house rather than relying on a modular government-managed supply chain. The trade-off is singular-source risk: one company responsible for motor, seeker, airframe, and integration. Oswald would argue that is exactly the point.
The scale of avoidable casualties from low-cost munitions in recent years is gut-wrenching. The U.S. has had the technology to defeat these threats for decades, but as adversaries stockpile millions and put them to use, we have reached a true crisis for interceptor inventory and production volume.
— Jack Oswald, Co-Founder and CEO, Singularity
As we wrote in July, the economics of drone defence are shifting faster than most procurement cycles can absorb. The difference is not whether they have the right interceptor design. It is whether their automotive-inspired line can actually produce at volumes that change the ratio. The $80 million buys an answer to that question within 18 months.