Big raises: defense, chips, space, sales AI

Four very different startups just pulled in very large checks within days of each other, and the mix is the story: a hypersonic aircraft company, a chip design firm, a satellite-servicing startup, and an artificial-intelligence sales agent company all found investors at the same time. (hermeus.com) (sifive.com) (starfishspace.com) (artisan.co) Hermeus said on April 7 that it closed $350 million in Series C financing, including $200 million in equity and $150 million in debt, and said the round pushed the company to a $1 billion post-money valuation. Khosla Ventures led the round for the Los Angeles-based defense aviation startup. (hermeus.com) Hermeus is trying to build unmanned aircraft that fly at “high-Mach” speeds, which means several times the speed of sound, for national security missions. The company said the new money will speed up delivery of military aircraft rather than a passenger jet business. (hermeus.com) (techcrunch.com) SiFive announced on April 9 that it raised an oversubscribed $400 million Series G round and said the financing valued the company at $3.65 billion. Atreides Management led the round, and Nvidia was one of the named investors. (sifive.com) (money.usnews.com) SiFive does not manufacture chips itself; it sells processor designs based on RISC-V, an open instruction set that works like a public blueprint for how a central processor chip understands commands. The company said it is using this round to push deeper into data-center central processor chips for artificial intelligence workloads. (sifive.com) (datacenterdynamics.com) Starfish Space said on April 7 that it raised more than $100 million in Series B funding led by Point72 Ventures, with Activate Capital and Shield Capital as co-leads. The Seattle-area company said the cash will help it execute its first satellite-servicing missions and expand production. (starfishspace.com) (geekwire.com) Satellite servicing is exactly what it sounds like: sending one spacecraft up to dock with another spacecraft so it can move it, inspect it, or help deorbit it instead of leaving dead hardware in orbit. Starfish’s vehicle is called Otter, and the company has also won Space Force contracts worth more than $50 million each in recent months. (starfishspace.com) (bizjournals.com) The software outlier in this group is Ava, the sales agent built by Y Combinator-backed Artisan, but even that bet follows the same logic: pay upfront to remove expensive bottlenecks later. Artisan says Ava finds leads, writes outreach, handles objections, and books meetings inside an all-in-one outbound sales platform. (ycombinator.com) (artisan.co 1) (artisan.co 2) I could not verify the “$36 million this week” figure for Ava from primary or high-quality current sources. The most recent verifiable funding I found is Artisan’s $25 million Series A announced on April 9, 2025, while current company materials and Y Combinator’s profile still describe Ava as the company’s flagship autonomous sales development product. (artisan.co) (ycombinator.com) (artisan.co) Put together, the pattern is not “artificial intelligence versus real-world industry.” Investors are writing nine-figure checks for aircraft, chips, and spacecraft that need factories, testing, and government customers, while still backing software that promises to cut headcount and tool sprawl in sales. (hermeus.com) (sifive.com) (starfishspace.com) (artisan.co) The common thread is not the product category but the pitch: build a hard bottleneck into infrastructure, or remove a hard bottleneck from labor. In April 2026, venture money is still willing to fund both sides of that equation. (reuters.com) (pymnts.com)