Helicon raises $16.5 million to scale production of composite structures for drones and other systems

Stealth-mode startup Helicon has raised $16.5 million. A company representative said the current team and direction came together over roughly four months; before that, he had spent about a year considering a different idea. He described Helicon as combining frontier hardware, robotics and software, and as developing a way to scale complex manufacturing, including for dual-use and defense work.

The company is based in Torrance, near many of its customers. The representative described its work as co-designing with customers and making the structural “skeleton” of systems that fly, move or connect other components. Helicon focuses on complex three-dimensional geometries and says its parts are six times stronger than plastic.

According to the representative, the company went from a blank facility to making its first part in 20 days, despite being told that this could not be done in 30. He described goals of making the design phase 10 times faster with software and reducing manufacturing processes that take a week to 30 minutes. These are stated goals and descriptions of the approach, not evidence that the performance has already been achieved at scale.

The company aims to reach production of millions of structures a year. Its building covers about 40,000 square feet. The representative cited commercial drones that, he said, are moving from prototypes to batches of 10–100 units: Helicon wants to offer a path to production of up to a million units a year. He compared today’s carbon-composite production to blacksmithing and described the company’s mission as industrializing these materials. The hosts’ question about the specific method used to make a structure went unanswered in this excerpt.