Overview
- Venus announced Wednesday that it closed a $91 million Series B round led by Mercury Fund with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures and several other investors to shift the company from demonstrations to scaled development and manufacturing.
- The company says it completed a high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine flight test in May 2026 and now aims to turn that prototype work into engines for missiles, launch vehicles, orbital transfer craft and lunar landers.
- Venus describes its RDRE as a ring-shaped combustion design that uses a continuous supersonic detonation wave to raise pressure and efficiency and claims roughly 15% better fuel efficiency than conventional rocket motors.
- Despite hundreds of ground tests, the firm’s longest continuous firing is about 32 seconds and engineers say they need sustained burns of roughly 6 to 15 minutes for many customer programs, so the new capital will go to longer-duration tests, larger test stands, hiring and factory scale-up.
- The technology rests on decades of research and recent advances in simulation and 3D printing, and investors’ defense ties reflect Pentagon interest in higher-performance propulsion plus domestic supply-chain production for hypersonic and space applications.