Volund Manufacturing raises $12M seed led by Root Ventures to build low-cost gas turbine engines
What's the deal? Volund Manufacturing, a defence-focused startup founded last year, has raised a $12M seed round led by Root VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. New investors Squadra and Output Capital joined, while MarlinspikeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and First In returned to the cap table. The 14-person company plans to use the funds to scale R&D and accelerate engineering on low-cost gas turbine engines for attritable military systems.
Volund's founding team blends consumer goods and aerospace experience. CEO Eric Hostetler previously worked at AndurilDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Oakley, and Apple. CTO Steven Stanley came from Aerojet Rocketdyne and Blue Origin, while chief manufacturing officer Ken Spaulding spent his career in precision machining and COO James Sonntag held product roles at Yeti and Oakley.
Why now? The US Department of Defense is pushing hard toward attritable systems — cheaper, expendable platforms built for high-volume production. Hostetler said propulsion is the "largest problem" in that shift, and that the manufacturing model required starts to look more like consumer goods than traditional aerospace.
Volund is building a vertically integrated factory in Huntington Beach, California, with a custom Manufacturing Execution System (MES) layered on top of off-the-shelf product lifecycle and enterprise planning tools. The idea: when an engineer changes an engine design in CAD, those updates flow automatically through the factory floor — cutting iteration time and back-office headcount.
The company previously raised an undisclosed pre-seed round from First In, Cyrus VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Marlinspike in 2025 and has spent the past year building out a 5,500 sq ft facility.
What could go wrong? Volund has no formal contracts or partnerships yet. It is still finalising its gas turbine engine design, with completion targeted by the end of June. Breaking into defence supply chains dominated by incumbents is notoriously difficult, even with the right product.
The company says it is "working with integrators" including Anduril, Raytheon, Lockheed, Zone 5 Technologies, and Leidos to ensure its engine design fits their needs — but those conversations have not yet turned into deals.
The signal: Root Ventures, an investment fund known for backing hardware-intensive startups, leading this seed underscores growing investor appetite for the unglamorous but critical components layer of defence tech. With the Pentagon's shift toward attritable mass creating demand for propulsion at consumer-goods price points, Volund's bet is that the bottleneck isn't engine design alone but the factory model behind it — a thesis compelling enough to draw both returning backers and new capital barely a year after the company's founding.
Read more: Tectonic Defense
