Firestorm Labs raised $82 million in Series B funding to scale a drone factory that fits inside a shipping container, the San Diego startup announced Wednesday. Washington Harbour Partners led the round, with NEA, Ondas, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Ventures, Geodesic, and Motley Fool Ventures participating. The new capital brings Firestorm's total funding to $153 million and lands as the Pentagon races to solve a logistics problem that a Pacific conflict would expose immediately: the nearest American drone factory is thousands of miles from any plausible front line.
Firestorm's product is xCell, a containerized manufacturing platform that prints drone systems in under 24 hours. Inside each container sits an industrial-grade HP 3D printer producing the body and shell of each airframe. Firestorm holds a five-year global exclusive with HP to use the company's industrial 3D printing technology inside mobile deployment units, CEO Dan Magy told TechCrunch. Weapons are not printed and are integrated separately.
The company already has paying customers across all branches of the U.S. military. Its Air Force contract carries a $100 million ceiling, of which $27 million has been obligated so far. Two xCell units are deployed domestically — one with the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York, and one with Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida. Firestorm says additional units are operational in the Indo-Pacific but declined to specify which commands.
Key facts
- 01Firestorm Labs raised $82M in Series B funding led by Washington Harbour Partners, bringing total funding to $153M.
- 02The xCell containerized factory prints drone bodies in under 24 hours using an industrial HP 3D printer.
- 03Firestorm holds a five-year global exclusive with HP for industrial 3D printing in mobile deployment units.
- 04An Air Force contract carries a $100M ceiling, with $27M obligated so far.
- 05Two xCell units are deployed domestically: one at Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York, and one with Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida.
Firestorm did not start out as a factory company. It began as a drone maker, then pivoted when customers asked to move production closer to where the drones would actually fly. Magy is a serial defense tech entrepreneur; co-founder Chad McCoy is a career special operations veteran, and CTO Ian Muceus holds more than a dozen patents in 3D printing.
“Firestorm's xCell prints a drone in under 24 hours from inside a shipping container, with two units already deployed to the Air Force in Rome, New York and Florida.”— Jaeden Schafer
The drones xCell prints are not single-purpose. "Depending on what mission requires, they can be configured for surveillance or electronic warfare," Magy said. He confirmed the platforms are capable of lethal operations and added that "all platforms are delivered to uniformed Department of Defense operational commands, who deploy them in accordance with military doctrine."
The pitch tracks with how the Pentagon now frames the problem. Contested logistics — keeping weapons and supplies moving under fire — is one of only six national critical technology areas the Department of Defense has designated. Fixed manufacturing sites are themselves targets, a vulnerability Ukraine has spent three years absorbing. And drone designs no longer hold still long enough for traditional procurement to keep up. "Lessons from Ukraine show drone designs can change within days, not months," Magy said.
The use cases are already broader than drones. Magy said the Army has used xCell to print replacement parts for a Bradley Fighting Vehicle on-site, components that would otherwise take months to procure through normal supply channels. That kind of field-level fabrication is what makes a containerized printer attractive to a logistics planner staring at a Pacific map.
Firestorm is not the only defense AI and autonomy company drawing capital at this scale. Scout AI raised $100 million earlier this month to train a vision-language-action model for the battlefield, and the broader category — autonomous systems built explicitly for U.S. and allied forces — has become one of the few defense subsectors where venture investors and primes like Lockheed are co-investing in the same rounds.
For Firestorm, the Indo-Pacific is the main event, where the company says the logistics challenges of modern conflict are hardest to solve. Magy said the goal is for xCell to reach full operational deployment in the region "ideally within the next two years." That is an aggressive timeline for any defense hardware program, let alone one built around mobile additive manufacturing.
The skeptic's case is straightforward. A $100 million contract ceiling with $27 million obligated is a foothold, not a program of record, and printing an airframe in under 24 hours says nothing about how those airframes survive contact with a peer adversary's electronic warfare. Firestorm has not disclosed unit economics, sortie counts, or attrition data from its Indo-Pacific deployments, and the company's pivot from drone maker to factory maker is recent enough that the manufacturing thesis remains largely untested at wartime tempo.
Still, the strategic logic is what is pulling capital into Firestorm. The U.S. military's drone problem is no longer about whether it can build enough airframes in Arizona or Alabama; it is about whether it can build them within range of where they need to fly, and adapt the design weekly while doing it. A shipping container with an HP printer inside is a strange-looking answer to that question, but it is a more serious one than the procurement system has produced on its own.
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