Venus Aerospace has secured $91 million in Series B funding led by Houston-based venture capital firm Mercury Fund, with additional backing from Lockheed Martin Ventures, MESH, PEAK6, Starboard Star Venture Capital, Green Sands Equity, and other investors. The raise follows the company’s May 2025 milestone: the first successful flight test of a high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE).
The funding will push Venus from that demonstration phase toward full-scale production of propulsion systems for defense and space applications. The announcement also comes shortly after Pam Melroy, former NASA Deputy Administrator, joined the company’s board.
How the Engine Works
Conventional rocket engines rely on subsonic combustion to burn fuel. Venus’s RDRE instead uses a continuous supersonic detonation wave that rotates around the combustion chamber, a design the company describes as the most efficient rocket engine architecture ever flown, outperforming existing systems by roughly 15 percent. That efficiency gain could translate into longer range, more flexible payloads, and stronger performance across both defense and space missions.
The engine itself is built using 3D printed components paired with standard materials, a manufacturing approach designed for domestic, large-scale production without dependence on constrained or foreign supply chains. It’s also reusable and throttleable, and rather than building separate engines for separate missions, Venus is positioning the RDRE as a shared propulsion platform that can serve munitions, space launch, orbital transfer, and landers alike.
Venus reached its first high-thrust RDRE flight test in just over four years, using $80 million in capital, a pace and capital efficiency the company positions as one of the fastest in the propulsion field. With this new $91 million round, total funding moves the company firmly into its scale-up phase.
Strategic Context
The raise lands at a moment when the U.S. and its allies are prioritizing hypersonic and long-range capability, seeking systems that outperform legacy platforms in speed and reach. Venus frames its work in Texas, built with American engineering talent, as a direct response to that demand for dependable, domestically sourced propulsion.
“This financing marks an important step in moving Venus from breakthrough demonstration to scaled capability,” said Sassie Duggleby, co-founder and CEO of Venus Aerospace. “Our customers need propulsion systems that go farther, can be produced reliably and are built on supply chains they can trust. We are advancing that capability with American engineering and manufacturing talent to strengthen U.S. defense, expand space access and support the future of high-speed flight.”
AM Is Becoming the Default for Detonation Engines
Venus Aerospace’s strategy hinges on a bet that’s now widely shared across the propulsion industry: rotating detonation rocket engines can’t be built any other way. The geometry these engines require, tight-tolerance injectors, integrated coolant channels, complex internal flow paths, is too intricate for conventional machining, which makes additive manufacturing a prerequisite.
Other organizations have arrived at the same conclusion through different paths. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, for example, has leaned on additive manufacturing specifically because the improvement in efficiency is so dramatic that the combustion environment is nearly impossible to contain and keep hardware cool, requiring 3D printed laser powder bed fusion components and specialized alloys like GRCop-42 and GRX-810 to make the engine viable at all.
More recently, Astrobotic completed a hot fire campaign for its Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine, with AM playing a central role in enabling the milestone. Two prototypes completed eight successful tests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, accumulating more than 470 seconds of total run time, including a single 300-second continuous burn believed to be the longest ever recorded for an RDRE.
Across these programs, the pattern is consistent: detonation combustion is too extreme for traditional fabrication, and 3D printing is what turns the concept into hardware. Venus’s $91 million raise extends that logic from prototype to production scale.
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Featured image shows Venus Aerospace Team. Photo via Venus Aerospace.
