Chaos Industries, the Hawthorne-based military intelligence startup, announced in mid-November it raised $510 million in fresh funding, putting the company at a $4.5 billion valuation.
The more-than-half a billion-dollar round was led by Valor Equity Partners with additional participation from previous investors like Accel and 8VC. The round came a mere four months after the company already raised $275 million in series C funding back in May. In total, the company has raised more than $1 billion since it was founded in 2022.
“Autonomous threats are compressing decision time on every front,” Antonio Gracias, the founder, chief executive and chief investment officer at Valor Equity Partners, said in a statement. “Chaos is developing the sensing and timing capabilities needed to restore that time advantage for U.S. and allied forces.”
It’s been a banner year for Chaos, which also landed two federal contracts at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. One contract came out of a $10 million appropriation to jumpstart the development of a new radar system, and the other was a $1.9 million award given to Chaos by the Air Force’s Tactical Funding Increase program.
Chaos makes sensing technology for the military sector. A product line of sensors and effectors, best known as coherent distributed networks, uses tech like the Vanquish radar to detect and track unmanned aerial systems such as missiles, drones and aircrafts that are nearby. The Astria radar can consistently monitor its environment for long periods of time. The company is working on developing and unveiling two other products in the near future.
“We give the warfighter more time because, if you can sense 10 minutes more when the competitor takes 22 seconds, you now have 10 minutes and 22 seconds (of time),” said Will Hurd, the chief strategy officer at Chaos. “And that opens up a whole other world of being able to understand the threat, figure out what tool in your toolkit you can use to deal with that threat and ultimately save lives.”
Venture capital poured more than $20.63 billion into aerospace and defense companies globally so far in 2025, breaking a record for funding in the space, according to PitchBook.
Funding military technology has spiked due to ongoing geopolitical conflict such as the war between Russia and Ukraine. They have highlighted the rapidly-changing technological developments in warfare – technology is produced faster with cheaper materials, allowing military operations to be nimbler. In comparison, the U.S. operated in a weapons development market dominated by big names like Lockheed Martin Corp. and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon), which were known for making high quality weapons that took a long time to develop and were cost-prohibitive at scale.
“A lot of the radars that our brothers and aunts and uncles are using to keep them safe are things that were developed in the ’70s,” said Hurd, a former CIA operative who served as a Republican congressman in Texas. “Can you imagine if we were still using TVs or phones from the ’70s?”