Good morning. Although the manufacturing sector has been traditionally slow to adopt new tech, Hadrian, an industrial automation startup, is all about speeding up the process. And it now has a new CFO, West Owens, a veteran finance professional who’s on board with the startup’s mission of re-industrializing America.
Hadrian is building a series of AI-automated precision component factories to enable space and defense manufacturers to get parts 10 times faster and at half the cost of making rockets, satellites, jets, and drones, according to the company. It currently operates a facility in Torrance, Calif., with other sites in development.
Hadrian is following a larger movement that's happening within Silicon Valley in defense and space tech, Owens told me in an exclusive interview. “It’s a chronically under-invested market and a white space for innovation,” he said.
Owens started in his new role in early October and brings more than 20 years of experience to Hadrian. Most recently, he was the CFO at TerraWatt Infrastructure, a charging solutions provider for electrified fleets. And, as VP of structured finance at SolarCity, he raised over $2 billion in diversified capital for the company and securitized the first solar service agreements and loans in the ABS market, according to Hadrian.
Chris Power, CEO of Hadrian, founded the startup in 2020. “I believe that with West’s financial guidance, we will be able to grow both the footprint of our own business and the capabilities we can offer our customers,” Power said in a statement.
The company raised $117 million from investors in its Series B financing in February 2024 and $90 million in its Series A in 2022. Among Hadrian’s backers are Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, RTX Ventures, and Construct Capital, to name a few. Lux Capital partner Brandon Reeves and Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle serve on Hadrian’s board of directors.
In August, Hadrian announced it acquired Datum Source, a software company founded by SpaceX alums Rob Pakalski, Thomas Cobbs, and Ryan Nagle. It uses AI to help hardware companies find manufacturing partners. Hadrian declined to comment on its valuation. But it is reported to be valued at around $500 million.
Looking at companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or Palantir Technologies within the software space, investors see Hadrian’s potential to find success with advanced manufacturing, Owens said.
It’s a huge industry, and very fragmented, with mom-and-pop machinist shops responsible for producing parts creating very constrained supply chains, Owens explained. Most of the machines at these shops run at low-efficiency levels when you factor in loading the parts and then staffing how to run the antiquated machines, he said.
“There's a reason why it takes us a really long time to build aircraft or fighter jets or rockets that are going into space or replenishing reserves, and that is because of the setup,” Owens said.
Hadrian aims to address supply chain issues in defense and space sectors by automating and optimizing production processes to run the machines more frequently to produce more parts, he said.
The company currently has over 200 full-time employees. Hadrian can take employees and train them to be able to run these machines quickly, whereas at a typical machine shop, it’s an apprenticeship-type situation, he said.
“We are actually not replacing jobs; we're creating jobs,” Owens told me.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna
