Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Hadrian’s $260 Million Series C Round with Hadrian CEO Chris Power 7/17/25

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Hadrian, a defense manufacturing startup focused on machine parts, has closed a $260 million Series C funding round. Led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Lux Capital, the capital will go towards building a 270,000 square foot factory in Arizona and expanding its California footprint. CEO Chris Power joins to discuss the raise, reviving American manufacturing and where defense tech goes from here.

joining me now Chris Power, the CEO and founder of Hadrian and Chris, it's great to speak with you today. Welcome. Likewise. Thanks for having me. Okay, before we get into the news, just first a little background on Hadrian. What is Hadrian and what are you focused on doing? Our mission is to re-industrialize America and I'm joining you filming at the Re-Industrialized Conference in Detroit. So the timing couldn't be better. Our mission is to reindustrialize the country and we do that by building AI powered smart factories that scale and make the new American industrial workforce ten times more productive. Do you already have factories that you've built and that are operating?

Yeah, we operate a hundred thousand square foot in LA and we're easily the fastest growing manufacturer in America What is fastest growing mean how quickly you're growing we 10x revenue last year alone. Wow Yeah, very lucky Okay, and so now you also just closed the new funding round so talk to me about that and what that enables We're very lucky to be announcing a 260 million dollar series C what that enables. We're very lucky to be announcing a $260 million Series C led by Founders Fund, Lox, new investors like Altimeter

and 1789 Capital, as well as our existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Construct, as well as a huge factory financing line led by Morgan Stanley. What that will enable is supercharging our explosive growth, both entering new manufacturing verticals, as well as scaling and launching factory three,

which will be up and running in Arizona by Christmas from start to finish in six months. It'll be about four times the size of our current facility in Los Angeles. Okay, so you're building these new high tech AI enabled factories. Are companies coming to you and outsourcing their manufacturing?

Like how does this work? The biggest challenge that manufacturers and defense primes or industries like maritime munitions have in this country is the lack of skilled workforce. You know, we're here at Reindustrialize and Secretary Fieldon of the Navy commented yesterday that the number one thing you could do as an American to help the nation is go pick up a trade. The reality is we just don't have that many machinists, welders or advanced skill sets in this country anymore. So what

we do is build and run these advanced factories that make the workforce 10 times more productive and enable a much lower entry point. So we can train someone in 30 days and they're 10 times more productive instead of taking 10 to 20 years. And that's what we really need in this country is this quantum leap above China's manufacturing model where it's about supercharging the worker versus replacing them. So yes, we are lucky enough to work with most of the large defense primes, the neoprimes and startups, as well as part of this financing is launching these dedicated divisions to support the maritime and munitions industrial base where we are frankly, a thousand to one behind China, which is a really important moment in time

to go fix really fast. It's super fascinating to me, especially when you start talking about this idea of bringing shipbuilding back to America. I think a lot of folks don't realize, appreciate or understand from a military shipbuilding standpoint, how slow and difficult that process is to make, for example, a nuclear submarine slower and more

difficult than it should be even, in part because of the labor dynamics. So when I hear you talk about using AI to basically help skilled workers, how much does that change the game, both on the defense side and also potentially on the commercial side, since I imagine you're gonna be dual use with all of this? That's right, we are a dual use company and China built almost more than 1,700 ships last year and the US built a grand total of five,

which is not great. And the primary issue is the lack of a workforce. And we really de-industrialized the country for the last four decades. And what that meant is we destroyed the middle of a workforce. And we really de-industrialized the country for the last four decades. And what that meant is we destroyed the middle of America and all these people that had really high paying jobs. In this era, you know, it's not about automating jobs away. It's about using automation to enable

10 times more productivity. And the way we think about it is to leapfrog China here, it's all about the people. And we want our software powered factories to give people like an Iron man suit so that you can get Up and running in 30 days instead of 20 years from any background a hundred percent of our workforce now have never set foot inside A factory, you know, they're from Home Depot. There were a bus driver their marine We feel like this is what the country needs is these advanced factories that are powering

industries like shipbuilding the submarine industrial base that are a secretaryan said, years behind schedule and the number one problem is the American talent. We have to use what is best in this country, the combination of American software and the American spirit in this fusion to really go fast and meet the growing threat of the Chinese Communist Party. You know it's interesting because I find myself having these conversations on TV and off TV, the debate about what AI is gonna do to jobs, and the idea that particularly white collar workers, entry level positions, AI may disrupt

and actually take away some of those jobs, or you need fewer people moving forward. But when we talk about it on the manufacturing side of things, it's a different dynamic, right? Like that's where the argument around AI increasing productivity really comes in at turbocharges. That's right. And for white collar jobs, I'm sure the AI economy will transform that. In manufacturing, we need millions and millions and millions of skilled welders, skilled quality experts, skilled machinists, skilled technicians.

And we could train a million of these folks, but we can't train 10. And we need this productivity gained through AI robotics and software powered factories to really help us get there at the start. I think you could give me a billion dollars and say, go hire a million machinists or a million welders. And it's just not possible because we

destroyed the talent in this country for the last four decades. And upgrading the next generation of the workforce with AI and robotics. One, we just need to do it because there aren't that level of skilled workforce left in the country. And secondly, it's the law manufacturing is the last job AI will ever replace. It's really about enabling and empowering versus, you know, destroying jobs. I think the second point is when we deindustrialized, we lost 80% of the manufacturing revenue offshore and if we can get more productive in the country what that will

create is ten times more new jobs as that volume comes back on shore and the productivity of the country ramps back up. So I think it's a the best thing we could possibly do for the American worker is give them this Ironman suit of AI software and robotics to be able to compete globally. You mentioned the fact that you're growing very quickly. You also mentioned the fact that you're working with folks on the defense side and commercially as well. We keep hearing about all of this new investment that's being pledged here in the U.S. You're at this reindustrialized conference.

What are you seeing in terms of demand signals and how quickly can you keep pace with it? That's a great question. So I think the demand signal is enormous. Keeping pace with this is about two things, financing, factories, and it's really about the workforce, which is why we so focused so hard on enablement and shortening this training and enablement cycle. I think the biggest challenge our country is going to have is making these big bets on national champions. Because to capitalize shipbuilding,

to capitalize the munitions base, even in drones where we are so far behind DGI in this country, I think the momentum is there. And I think compared to last year at Reindustrialize, we've got Ambassador Greer, Secretary of the Navy Phelan and many other folks in the government that have realized that manufacturing is no longer an economic issue, it's a national security issue. I don't think we're there yet and we have to do a lot more, a lot faster, but certainly we're able to keep up with the scale right now and grateful to our team and customers for letting us go and do that, but as a country we have to treat this like a national security crisis, not just the economics of manufacturing. Are prospective workers on board like do

they understand that the jobs they're going in to do in factories such as yours are gonna be very different and maybe even more high-tech or I guess you require this software troubleshooting skill set? They do I mean we have a very unique model and I'll say our workforce is very passionate. You know, whether they're coming out of the military or, you know, they had a job at Home Depot or they were a desk worker. One of my favorite people at Hadrian was a paralegal filling out forms during COVID. And now he's in our company running 10 machines at once with all these advanced things and working with software engineers. I don't think the country has realized what advanced manufacturing can look like as a cool job.

One of the biggest problems that we've got culturally is your dad lost their job in manufacturing in the 90s, so you told your son or daughter to go get a four-year college degree. At Hadrian, people understand this. It's an awesome place to work, we think. People have really advanced skill sets and get to work on the national mission.

As a country, I think we need to wake up and recognize that these new factories and new jobs are a far sight better than the jobs of old and certainly what we see in China. But I really think we have to reinvigorate the culture about the skilled trades and that you don't need a four-year college degree to earn a lot of money or be really successful in this country. So are you developing the software and the hardware that's on these factory floors? How to think about that and how you're partnering with other companies?

So we upgrade very dumb machines. We buy all our capex off the shelf and then make everything smart. And we've built this full stack software platform called Opus, which coordinates our factories, you know, reduces the amount of skilled time needed and makes it simple enough that we can enable this new generation of American industrial workforce. The reality is software and manufacturing is 30 years behind the rest of Silicon Valley, so there's a lot of headroom and productivity and a lot of things we can do with software, robotics and AI. And it's really this full stack approach to factory autonomy that is enabling us to scale and enable this new workforce and keep up with this explosive customer demand.

So when Jensen Huang comes out and says the next era is industrial AI, is this it? Are you on the front lines of it or is it going to look even, I guess, even more different than it does right now? I think we will continue to upgrade factories and we get better and better every month, every quarter and every year. I think with physical AI, unlike software engineering or data labeling a piece of paper, because manufacturing has been offline, there isn't really any good training data to enable these AI models.

At Hadrian, we have the largest set of trained labeled data in manufacturing anywhere in the world is my belief. And that will enable us to get better and better with our AI models over time as we scale faster and faster, we've got more data. But because manufacturing has been offline for 30 years, you really need software powered factories to capture that in the first place so that as we scale, the system keeps improving. But I do think that if you think about job creation and the workforce in this country, manufacturing and the physical world is so far behind the AI revolution that we're seeing in filling out a sheet of paper or writing code, which I think is a really good answer for how do we enable the rest of the country's job creation.

Let's go AI first in manufacturing and reshow all this volume and not worry about whether we're going to lose jobs because we don't have the skilled workforce. Let's reshore all this manufacturing volume and a hundred X the amount of jobs and make them really cool and advanced and put factories all in the middle of the country. What do you see as your competitors? We're really competing against ourselves. We're very lucky that this is such a hard task to do with getting to the sort of software scale, the workforce and the CAPEX. We're really competing at ourselves and I think it's a race against the clock. We truly believe that we are in this 15-year window of seeing the CCP rise and making sure

the national policy is focused on re-industrializing the country. Really it's about how fast can we go? How many people can we train? How many factories can we stand up? How many of the primes or the neoprimes can we help transform to this advanced style of manufacturing? We're lucky enough that this is just such a difficult job that I wish there were 20 more Hadrons, there just aren't, which means we are going to rapidly expand into every

type of manufacturing that has a critical need for the DOD and national security. But I wish we had more competitors because I think this has got to be a national mission that is not manufacturing economy. It's national security priority. Number one. How did you decide to start this company? What was the what was the moment for you? You said this is what we need. I'm going to make a bet on this.

I mean, I feel like it's what everybody's talking about now, but that wasn't the case a couple of years ago. That's right. And, you know, I'm Australian, probably the most patriotic American Australian you'll ever see. And from the Asian perspective, it was very clear that things were going to change in the world and the CCP is such a strong rising power. And if you look back through history, every 120 years, there's a great power competition. The last time this happened it was the Dutch to the British Empire, then the British Empire to the American Empire, which was like a very good thing for the world to have Americans

leading Pax Americana and the security of the globe. Now we're in this 20 year window where it's very obvious that we can't ship enough munitions to Ukraine. We can't build ships anymore and this is going to create a scenario where China knows that we are weaker than we think we are and our job is to re-industrialize the country so that America continues to lead the world for the next 500 years and this has to be fixed in this 20-year window where the threat of China taking Taiwan and by the way they're not going to stop at Taiwan they're going to keep

going is the most critical thing we could be working on because the reality the threat of China taking Taiwan. And by the way, they're not going to stop at Taiwan. They're going to keep going. Is the most critical thing we could be working on because the reality is there isn't another America to try this again with this time. It's literally the American Pax Americana system. It's been incredibly good for the world with all its flaws versus the Chinese communist party. And we have to fix this in this 20 year window.

Otherwise, I don't really want to think about, you know any other option than winning this fight. It's the power of Hadrian. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching

our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.