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.