Firestorm Labs Raises $82M Series B to Ship Container-Sized Drone Factories to the Front Line (April 29, 2026)

San Diego defense-tech startup Firestorm Labs announced on April 29, 2026 that it has closed an $82 million Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, lifting the company's total capital raised to roughly $153 million. The round funds the production scale-up of its xCell platform — a drone factory packed into a standard shipping container that 3D-prints UAVs in the field.

What Happened

According to TechCrunch and confirmed by Washington Technology, Firestorm's Series B was led by Washington Harbour Partners with participation from NEA, Ondas, In-Q-Tel (the CIA's strategic investment arm), Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Ventures, Geodesic, and Motley Fool Ventures. The round closes a year in which the company expanded from roughly 40 employees to more than 160.

Firestorm CEO Dan Magy framed the raise as a transition from prototype to production. "Customers told us they didn't want to ship drones — they wanted to ship the factory," he told Defense Daily. The Series B follows an earlier $47 million Series A in 2025, bringing total disclosed funding to $153 million.

Key Details

• xCell platform — Each unit is a 20-foot shipping container holding an HP industrial 3D printer, off-grid power, and assembly tooling. Firestorm holds a five-year global exclusive with HP to deploy the printer line in mobile units.
• Tempest 50 drone — Weighs 55 lbs, has a 6-foot fuselage, prints in 9 hours, and is fully assembled in 36 hours. Firestorm pitches that timeline as roughly an order of magnitude faster than a traditional fixed factory line.
• $100M Air Force contract — Carries a ceiling of $100 million; $27 million has been obligated so far, per the company's filings.
• Two xCell units already deployed — One at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York, and one at Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida.
• Headcount — Grew from about 40 to more than 160 employees over the past 12 months.
• Founders — CEO Dan Magy is a serial defense-tech operator; Chad McCoy is a career special-operations veteran; CTO Ian Muceus holds more than a dozen 3D-printing patents.

What Investors and Operators Are Saying

The cap table is unusually mixed for a Series B at this size, blending pure-play venture (NEA, Geodesic), strategics (Lockheed Martin, Ondas), national-security capital (In-Q-Tel, Booz Allen Ventures), and a retail-investor brand (Motley Fool Ventures). On Hacker News and r/Military, commenters drew direct lines to lessons from the Ukraine conflict — where small, attritable, locally-produced UAVs have repeatedly outperformed expensive long-lead-time platforms — as the implicit thesis behind "factory-on-a-truck" investing. The most-upvoted critical reaction in defense-tech circles questioned whether 3D-printed airframes can survive sustained combat conditions; Firestorm's response, repeated to Axios Pro, is that low cost-per-airframe is the point — Tempests are designed to be expendable.

What This Means for Developers and Defense Tech

For software and hardware engineers in the defense-tech category, the round reinforces a now-explicit investor preference for deployable systems over platform plays. The same week Firestorm closed, Parallel Web Systems raised at a $2B valuation on a similar "infrastructure that ships" thesis. Firestorm's xCell is also a meaningful proof point for HP's industrial 3D-printing line as a deployable manufacturing primitive — a use case HP itself has been pushing since 2024 but had few production references for. Expect more tooling startups to surface around field-deployable manufacturing: CAM software, on-device QA, and OTA print-job orchestration are all newly addressable categories.

What's Next

Firestorm has signalled that the Series B will fund scale-up of xCell production, additional U.S. military deployments beyond the two existing sites, and international export programs through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) channel. The company has not announced a Series C timeline. Hiring continues to weigh toward manufacturing engineering, embedded systems, and additive-manufacturing software roles, per Firestorm's careers page.

Sources

• TechCrunch — Firestorm Labs raises $82M to take drone factories into the field — primary reporting with founder quotes and contract figures.
• Washington Technology — Firestorm Labs wraps up $82M Series B round — investor list and round mechanics.
• Defense Daily — Firestorm Labs Raises $82 Million To Transition Mobile 3D Printing Tech
• Axios Pro — Firestorm Labs raises $82M for mobile drone factories
• Tech Funding News — Firestorm Labs $82M Series B led by Washington Harbour
• OODAloop — Firestorm Labs company profile — background on the xCell program and previous contracts.
• Firestorm Labs — official press release archive