Hypersonica raises €100M Series B, co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst, for European hypersonic deep-strike missiles

TLDR

• Hypersonica, a British-German hypersonic missile developer, raised a €100M Series B co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst.¹²
• The company did not disclose a valuation; the Financial Times reportedly put it at about €700M.³⁴
• No customer is named, and the company targets deep-strike systems by 2029.¹²

Hypersonica has raised a €100M Series B co-led by Lightspeed, through partner Alexander Schmitt, and General Catalyst, through Jeannette zu Fürstenberg.¹ Existing investors Plural, 201 Ventures and SPRIND, Germany's federal agency for breakthrough innovation, also took part, according to the company release; Resilience Media, Tech.eu and The Next Web omit SPRIND from their lists.¹²⁵⁴ The company did not disclose a valuation, but Tech Funding News and The Next Web report that the Financial Times, citing unnamed sources, put it at about €700M.³⁴ The round follows a €23.3M Series A in February 2026 led by Plural, and Tech Funding News adds a €2.5M seed led by General Catalyst, taking total funding to about €125M or €126M depending on the outlet.³⁶²⁴ The money is to speed up deep-strike development, raise test cadence, expand operations across Europe and create hundreds of engineering and manufacturing jobs in the UK and Germany.¹ Sources do not say whether any part of the round is debt or grant funding.¹²

Hypersonica says its prototype HS-1 flew above Mach 6 over more than 300 km in February 2026 from Andøya in Norway, which it describes as a first for a privately funded European defence company, and that its development model cuts costs by more than 80 per cent.¹³⁴ It targets deep-strike systems by 2029 and calls itself "sovereign, ITAR-free."¹ Resilience Media reports that it "does not disclose any specific customers," while chief executive Philipp Kerth said: "We are responding to a very clear demand signal from several European countries and from NATO."² The company release points to the UK Defence Investment Plan's initial £770 million over four years for the UK-German Deep Precision Strike programme, and to a NATO-led initiative announced in July that envisages £37 billion of investment in such capabilities over the next decade.¹ Tech.eu says Hypersonica "is part of" the Trinity House agreement behind that programme, but the release does not say it holds a Deep Precision Strike contract, so treat that as unconfirmed.¹⁵ Tech Funding News lists what is still missing: a named buyer, a manoeuvring flight and a per-missile price, and names Castelion, Hermeus and Destinus as rivals.³ Resilience Media also names North Vector Dynamics.² Kerth and chief technology officer Marc Ewenz both hold Oxford doctorates; the firm was founded in December 2023 and is headquartered near Munich with a London subsidiary.⁴⁶⁵

On investors, Tech Funding News says Lightspeed led Castelion's Series A, co-led its Series B and joined its $1B Series C at a $13B valuation in August 2026, and also backs Helsing.³ The same report says General Catalyst led Helsing's €209M Series B in 2023 and €450M Series C in 2024, and led Hypersonica's seed.³ Lightspeed does not appear in the Series A investor list, which names Plural, SPRIND, General Catalyst and 201 Ventures, but no source calls it a new investor outright.⁶ Tectonic Defense also frames the round around the UK-German programme and the HS-1 test vehicle's Magellan Aerospace motor.⁷

Why it matters: two of the investors behind Castelion and Helsing now back a European hypersonic start-up that has a reported €700M valuation, a February prototype flight as its public milestone and no named customer, so the bet rests on public deep-strike budgets rather than orders.¹²³⁴ The next signals are a named buyer and a second, manoeuvring flight.³