Startup accelerator Y Combinator is backing its first weapons startup — a company it says can make rockets smaller and cheaper than its competitors.
“Ares is building a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles. We will deliver the capabilities the DoD wants in a form factor that is 10 times smaller and 10 times cheaper,” Ares Industries co-founders Devan Plantamura and Alex Tseng wrote in a post on the YC website.
The two worked at other defense startups before teaming up to found Areas Industries in May this year.
Ares Industries, YC partner Jared Friedman said, could prove critical if China attacks Taiwan.
“While the world is focused on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world is much closer to a war in the Taiwan Strait than most people realize,” Friedman wrote in an August 20 X post.
“In a war with Taiwan, we would be firing thousands of anti-ship missiles a week and our stockpile would be depleted in days. The ability to produce enough missiles to be competitive is the best way to deter war,” he continued.
The investment in Ares Industries marks the first time YC has taken a stake in a defense startup.
The famous startup accelerator is better known for its picks in the software space, with companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox and Reddit among its top picks.
But Friedman has high hopes for the young arms maker. Ares Industries, he says, can do for rockets what Elon Musk’s SpaceX did for the rocket industry.
“When SpaceX entered space launch vehicles in 2002, Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed a duopoly. Likewise, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are the only two major players delivering cruise missiles today,” he wrote to X last week.
“And just like when ULA made all the rockets to launch into space, the rockets that these companies make are bloated by years of cost-plus and no-bid contracts,” he added, referring to the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
In their post on the YC website, Plantamura and Tseng said they spent the summer building and testing multiple prototypes.
“In 11 weeks, we went from launching the company to flight testing with our own design. We are on track to deliver early operational missile systems to our first customers by mid-2025,” they wrote.
Representatives for Ares Industries and YC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
Of course, YC isn’t the only Silicon Valley outfit trying to disrupt the defense sector.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a lecture at Stanford University in April that he was working with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun to mass-produce drones for Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia.
“Because of the way the system works, I’m now a licensed gun dealer,” Schmidt said during the lecture, which was briefly posted on Stanford’s YouTube channel this month before being taken down.