Ares Industries
Ares Industries is an El Segundo, California startup building compact, low-cost anti-ship cruise missiles — Y Combinator's first-ever weapons company — pitched at roughly a tenth the size and price of the primes' legacy strike weapons.
Background
Ares Industries launched in 2024 out of Y Combinator's Summer batch, the accelerator's first weapons company. Chief executive Alex Tseng, a former Rivian self-driving engineer who studied turbojet propulsion at Carnegie Mellon, started it after spotting a US Navy request for information seeking an air-launched strike weapon costing no more than $300,000 and buildable at 500 units a year. He teamed with Devan Plantamura, a Navy combat veteran who had worked at drone-and-missile startup Mach Industries and at a failed anti-tank venture called Longinus.
The pitch is blunt: existing anti-ship cruise missiles are 3,000-pound, multimillion-dollar behemoths built to sink destroyers, when the Pacific fight will turn on killing swarms of smaller corvettes, frigates and cheap drone boats. Ares says its missiles will run roughly ten times smaller and ten times cheaper, fly at high-subsonic speed, and fit existing launchers. Within 11 weeks of founding, the team designed and flew unarmed prototypes in the Mojave Desert. Its two advertised systems, Goose and Maverick, are containerized weapons pitched at about a 20-pound payload out to 100 miles and a 100-pound payload out to as far as 1,000 miles, respectively.
Financial footing
- ~$500K seed via Y Combinator (Summer 2024 batch), announced Aug 2024
- No follow-on round or valuation disclosed as of mid-2026
- No publicly confirmed DoD production contract — the company was spawned by a US Navy (NAVAIR) RFI for a sub-$300,000 air-launched weapon producible at ~500 units/year
- Reports of a ~$38M a16z-led seed are unsupported and appear to conflate Ares with a16z-backed peer Castelion
- Backers: Y Combinator (S24 batch); smaller pre-seed backers including FAST by Gettylab, Twenty Two Ventures, Orange Collective and Unpopular Ventures. No Andreessen Horowitz involvement is supported by the record.
Funding is where the hype outruns the record. Every venture database, the accelerator's own listings, Crunchbase, PitchBook and Tracxn, shows a single seed of about $500,000 tied to the Summer 2024 batch, not the eight-figure, a16z-led round sometimes attributed to the company. Named backers include Y Combinator plus small pre-seed funds such as FAST by Gettylab, Twenty Two Ventures, Orange Collective and Unpopular Ventures; no valuation has been disclosed.
That capital base is tiny next to the cheap-missile field: El Segundo neighbor Castelion drew $14 million partly from Andreessen Horowitz, and Mach Industries has raised north of $80 million. One aggregator lists roughly $550,000 in revenue against a five-person team, but the figure is unverified. As of mid-2026 no follow-on round has been publicly confirmed.
Major customers & contracts
There is no publicly confirmed production contract. The company's origin was a Naval Air Systems Command information request, and its stated aim was to hand early working systems to first customers by mid-2025, a milestone with no independent confirmation.
The demand signal it is chasing is real: the Pentagon's Replicator effort and the Pacific 'hellscape' concept both prize cheap, mass-produced effects, and the Defense Innovation Unit has separately funded low-cost cruise-missile test vehicles. But at its 2024 launch Ares had not yet secured the federal explosives and firearms licenses needed to field a live weapon, a reminder of how far a two-person prototype sits from a fielded munition.
Leadership & contact surface
Leadership: Alex Tseng
Official site: https://www.aresindustries.com
Competitive position
Ares is entering a crowded lane. Anduril's Barracuda family already markets modular, mass-manufacturable cruise missiles with vastly deeper pockets behind it. The incumbents Ares targets, Lockheed Martin's LRASM at roughly $3 million a round, plus the Naval Strike Missile, Harpoon and Tomahawk, all in the $1-2 million range, are exactly the 'dinosaurs' its backers deride, but they are combat-proven and in production.
Adjacent startups crowd in too: Castelion on hypersonics, Mach Industries on cruise missiles and drones, and the vendors in the Air Force-DIU Enterprise Test Vehicle program. Ares's differentiation is narrow and specific: an anti-ship-first, containerized weapon engineered from the outset for a sub-$300,000 unit cost and swarm use against smaller ships and drone boats.
Battlefield relevance
The thesis rests on a Taiwan-scenario arithmetic problem. US and allied magazines of anti-ship weapons would empty in weeks against China, and Navy intelligence has warned that Chinese shipbuilding capacity dwarfs America's by a wide margin. Spending a $3 million missile to sink a $200,000 uncrewed boat, or firing a destroyer-killer at a frigate, is a losing trade at scale.
A cheap, containerized missile fielded in the hundreds or thousands is meant to restore magazine depth and impose cost. The caveat is heavy: Ares's weapons remain pre-production concepts, flown only as unarmed prototypes, with no demonstrated warhead, guided end-to-end test or fielded round.
Sources & verification
- The War Zone — New 'Cheap' Cruise Missile Concept Flight Tested By Silicon Valley-Backed Start-Up (Aug 21, 2024)
- Forbes — Y Combinator Leaps Into Defense Tech With Missile Company Investment (Aug 29, 2024)
- TechCrunch — Y Combinator backs its first defense startup, Ares Industries (Aug 25, 2024)
- Financial Times — Start-up incubator Y Combinator backs its first weapons firm (Aug 24, 2024)
- Y Combinator — Ares Industries: Building low-cost cruise missiles (S24 profile)