3D Printed Drone Accelerator Firestorm Labs Continues Its Tear With $47M Sequence A – 3DPrint.com

July 17, 2025

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Firestorm Labs dominated the additive manufacturing (AM) business’s consideration within the first half of 2025, kicking off the yr with its announcement of a $100 million Indefinite Supply, Indefinite Amount (IDIQ) U.S. Air Drive contract to ship modular, 3D printed drones over a five-year interval. The corporate has additionally lately shaped a partnership with HP to combine the Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) ecosystem into Firestorm’s flagship xCell deployable manufacturing unit, positioning the corporate to in the end department out past the protection sector by focusing on utility areas comparable to emergency medical response.

Now, Firestorm has formally introduced the outcomes of its Sequence A spherical, and the numbers reside as much as the corporate’s buzz: $47 million, which follows a $12.5 million seed spherical introduced in Q1 final yr. Much more spectacular than the greenback quantity is the listing of buyers, with the spherical being led by New Enterprise Associates, a enterprise agency whose portfolio consists of a few of the most profitable startup investments anybody might’ve made during the last couple of many years.

Additionally collaborating within the spherical have been the enterprise arms of protection primes like Booz Allen and Lockheed Martin, the latter of which additionally contributed to the seed spherical. Firestorm, primarily based in San Diego and based in 2022, plans to allocate the Sequence A funds to a manufacturing facility that may deal with scaled-up output, in addition to to rent new engineers.

3D printing has revolutionized drone manufacturing, a trajectory drastically accelerated by conflicts in Ukraine and the Center East, and sending Western firms — and the DoD — scrambling to make up misplaced floor. Over the past a number of months, U.S. navy officers, notably these from the U.S. Military, have been more and more vocal about ramping up the function of AM within the DoD’s inner drone manufacturing capability.

Firestorm’s drones being examined on the Joint Interagency Subject Experimentation workouts. Picture courtesy of Daniel Linehan, Naval Postgraduate Faculty, through DVIDS.

In a press launch about Firestorm Labs’ $47 million Sequence A spherical, Brian MacCarthy, managing associate of Booz Allen Ventures, mentioned, “Sustaining a aggressive benefit means investing boldly in applied sciences that match the tempo and complexity of contemporary threats. Firestorm is delivering breakthrough expertise designed for pace, scale, and survivability on the earth’s most difficult environments. Their capability to maneuver quick and remedy onerous issues is precisely what the U.S. and its allies want to remain forward within the battlespace.”

The CEO and co-founder of Firestorm Labs, Dan Magy, mentioned, “We’re thrilled about this milestone, as a result of it empowers Firestorm to ship essential, battlefield-ready options sooner and at scale. Our distinctive capability to 3D print modular airframes on-site dramatically reduces manufacturing timelines, prices, and logistical constraints, giving the U.S. and allied forces the adaptive expertise they urgently want in advanced and contested operational environments.”

Unmanned Aerial Methods. Picture courtesy of Firestorm Labs

Firestorm is doing what all essentially the most profitable AM firms have been doing during the last a number of years: quite than merely inventing new merchandise, it’s inventing new approaches to logistics. Similar to propulsion specialist Ursa Main, Firestorm is succeeding by embracing its standing as an AM firm, one thing that the majority AM firms are (justifiably) reluctant to do as of late.

What can different firms study from the Firestorms and the Ursa Majors, except for the truth that they need to goal the protection sector? Above all, maybe, the lesson is that the AM business must go wherever {hardware} producers are placing a premium on fast iteration cycles.

It sounds unusual that the AM business ought to must be reminded of this, on condition that the unique function of additive applied sciences was exactly to allow fast iteration. Nonetheless, the legitimate goal to maneuver past prototyping could have obscured the fact that AM’s best worth proposition is its capability to ship agility in product design.

Intriguingly, that’s how Firestorm’s concentrate on logistics, the most recent present within the AM business, ties again to the business’s roots. By inserting manufacturing applied sciences as shut as attainable to the purpose of want — wherever that could be — Firestorm is placing the person expertise immediately on the forefront of the design cycle.