Manufacturing startup Hadrian to expand to Arizona, and into defense primes’ own factories

WASHINGTON — Manufacturing startup Hadrian is growing its footprint, with the company today announcing a third production site in Mesa, Ariz., as well as the launch of its new maritime division.

The California-based company that uses AI and robotics to quickly build parts for the defense and aerospace sector is also unveiling its new “factories-as-a-service” model, which will allow defense primes to bring Hadrian in to optimize their own factories or to stand up production for parts, assemblies or entire products, CEO and founder Chris Power told Breaking Defense.

“We’re working with companies of all sizes on factories-as-a-service, primarily where the program itself is a real manufacturing challenge to scale up, [or] where there’s super scarce workforce needs,” Power said, adding that activities include both existing programs and efforts that have yet to begin production.

Power declined to discuss specifics of the programs or the companies with which Hadrian working, but the factories-as-a-service construct is meant to essentially allow Hadrian to come into the facility run by anyone from a small firm to a major prime and optimize how something is made, and even produce it inside that factory.

“Customers are coming to us and saying, we actually want you to handle all of the manufacturing, not just precision components,” Power said. “That’s one of the big leaps that we’ve seen out of demand, where I think a lot of people are realizing that you have to use highly automated factories with a new American workforce to be able to scale into some of these challenges.”

Hadrian has been growing rapidly since its founding in 2020. Power previously told Breaking Defense that revenues for the company were $3 million in 2023 and were expected to grow by 10 times in 2024. Power declined to disclose its 2024 revenue but claimed it met the company’s projections. Revenues for 2025 are expected to “aggressively grow,” if not at the same rate as last year, he said.

The company’s expansion from its current two factories —  a 100,000-square-foot plant in Torrance, Calif., and smaller facility in Hawthorne, Calif. — is largely enabled by a $260 million Series C financing raise led by Founders Fund and Lux Capital, which was also announced today.

The company said it intends to invest $200 million into the 270,000 square foot factory in Mesa, which will launch in January 2026 and support 350 new jobs. The company is also searching for a 400,000 square foot facility to serve as its new corporate and R&D headquarters.

“Most of the story is just aggressive scale,” Power said. “We launched Factory 2 [in Torrance] in 2024, scaled it in about five quarters in terms of both revenue and productive output. And now we need to keep launching new factories for customers, because the demand keeps increasing.”

In addition to the growth in facilities, Hadrian plans to dive into more specialized areas of defense manufacturing, such as munitions and drones. Its newly established Hadrian Maritime unit will focus on manufacturing naval-specific products that often have unique requirements for specific welding or inspection techniques.

With the shipbuilding industry starved for skilled workers, Hadrian’s model of automating as much of production as possible could present an opportunity for customers in the maritime industry, Power said.

“The main critical problem across shipbuilding is the workforce. So we’re deploying the same model as the rest of Hadrian, which is, let’s get it 80 to 90 percent automated, and then have the rest so easy that we can train a brand new maritime workforce,” he said.

“We’ve been developing maritime specific technology for the last 12 months … and we’ve been working directly with a lot of customers on this,” Power said, adding that the company will be able to disclose some of the shipbuilding programs and companies it is working with in about nine months.

So far, Hadrian’s maritime manufacturing operation have been taking place in California, but it plans to open another factory next year that will specialize in producing parts for the naval market, Power said.