Jack Oswald never planned to start a company.

As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oswald spent his semesters interning for companies such as Tesla Inc., Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Impulse Space Inc. and the U.S. Air Force while working on space-related research projects at the university.

Oswald was planning on attending graduate school when a handful of startup founders urged him to take the entrepreneurial path.

“They all ganged up on me around graduation time and told me, ‘What are you doing? You have to go start a company,’” Oswald said.

That company became Singularity Defense Corp., a three-year-old defense startup in El Segundo building interceptors to catch missiles and weapons before they land. The company, which Oswald co-founded with Shail Giroux, announced mid-July it raised $80 million in series A funding.

The round, which now values the company at $400 million, was led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis. West Hollywood-based Sunflower Capital, AE Industrial Partners and several other venture capital firms also participated in the funding round.

“The character of warfare is changing rapidly as low-cost drones proliferate across the battlefield,” James McConville, operating partner at AE Industrial Partners, said in a statement. “The challenge is no longer simply building effective air defense systems, but delivering them at the scale, speed, and cost required to keep pace with the threat.”

The genesis of Singularity

Oswald was inspired by a trip to Ukraine in 2023, where he met service members who were injured by drone strikes. At the same time, Israel’s Iron Dome – a comprehensive air defense system that intercepts and destroys certain kinds of drones, missiles and rockets – re-entered the national spotlight during rising tensions between the country and its neighbors.

Singularity’s story is like many defense startups that have entered the fray. The U.S. does produce its own interceptors – most notably, the Patriot missile by the Lockheed Martin Corp. – but these systems are expensive to produce. 

Oswald believes Singularity’s air defense systems will be cheaper and easier to produce than what is currently on the market. Right now, the company is constructing and testing its product up to eight times a month. That quick turnaround time forced Singularity to be vertically integrated in order to quickly make unique, specific parts for new configurations.

“If you’re a small company with no website and no money, you’re not going to be able to get any major aerospace subcontractor to go and build you a bespoke part, especially a complicated energetics or aerospace part,” Oswald said.