Hadrian valued at nearly $8 billion after fresh funding as money pours into defense tech

Riding a wave of enthusiasm for defense tech, manufacturing startup Hadrian said on Thursday that it has closed its latest round of funding at a $7.9 billion valuation, more than quadruple where investors valued the company in January.

Hadrian, which builds advanced factories for defense and aerospace companies and agencies, raised nearly $1.4 billion in a round led by Baillie Gifford, J.P. Morgan Strategic Investment Group, and a number of others, including Washington Harbor Partners.

"It enables us to make massive investments to scale our workforce, our software platform Opus that powers our factories, and frankly, get ahead of the massive amounts of production challenges the country has in areas like submarines, munitions, the drone industrial base," CEO Chris Power told CNBC's Morgan Brennan on "Morning Call" on Thursday.

Power said the company's Opus software is being used by the Army and Navy, and the company will be announcing other defense primes soon.

"With physical AI sweeping the physical economy, which is 100 times larger than the digital economy, everyone's going to need to rebase their software to adapt and compete in this new world," Power told CNBC.

Hadrian is the latest in a series of high-profile defense funding rounds, fueled by President Donald Trump's push to reindustrialize the U.S. military and scale a robust manufacturing base. Trump is seeking to spend an unprecedented $1.5 trillion on defense as geopolitical tensions heighten the need for new weapons and spur calls to reduce U.S dependence on expensive missile systems.

Shield AI, whose technology powers drones, raised money in March at a $12.7 billion valuation, and that month autonomous ship maker Saronic, whose technology was used in Iran, was valued at $9.25 billion in a new funding round. Anduril doubled its valuation two months later to over $60 billion.

Last year, Hadrian raised $260 million, with funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, to build a new factory and bolster naval defense capabilities.