Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, has authorized a sweeping expansion of its corporate venture capital arm, Lockheed Martin Ventures, lifting its capacity from $400 million to $1 billion. The 250% increase — the largest since the fund was founded in 2007 — cements the unit as one of the biggest defense-focused corporate venture vehicles in the world and reflects a red-hot market for military and dual-use technologies. The move follows a record-breaking year for defense tech startup funding and comes as primes race to secure access to emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence, autonomy, quantum computing, directed energy, and advanced nuclear power.
Key Overview
- Lockheed Martin Ventures’ capacity expands from $400m to $1bn, a 250% increase.
- It is the largest boost since the fund’s 2007 launch with $100m in initial capital.
- To date, the fund has invested more than $500m across 120+ companies; 60+ have become Lockheed suppliers, winning over $750 million in contracts.
- Recent deals include a $28m Series A for satellite-software startup Antaris and a strategic add-on investment into nuclear-microreactor firm Radiant.
- The expansion lands as U.S. defense tech equity funding nearly tripled to $14.2bn in 2025, according to CB Insights.
US defense contractor Lockheed Martin has sharply increased the size of its corporate venture fund by 250% to $1 billion, making Lockheed Martin Ventures one of the largest defense-tech corporate venture capital (CVC) funds on the planet, amid a powerful surge in capital flowing into military and dual-use technologies.
The capital boost — announced from the company’s Bethesda, Maryland headquarters — is the largest since the fund was launched in 2007 with $100 million of initial funding. That capacity was expanded to $200 million in 2018 and then $400 million four years later. Lockheed Martin said it will use the increase over future periods to mature critical technologies for national security, helping accelerate the most promising innovations from research-and-development into the Defense Industrial Base.
“Our venture capital investments are a critical part of our overall strategy to develop and integrate the best technologies for national security now and in the future,” said Evan Scott, CFO of Lockheed Martin, in a release.
“Our investments help create a pipeline of cutting-edge technologies that create a resilient industrial base, drive growth and ultimately help the United States and its allies deter the most pressing emerging threats,” he added.
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Nearly two decades of defense tech deployment
Lockheed Martin Ventures has invested more than $500 million in over 120 companies since its founding, the company said in the release, with more than 60 portfolio companies having become suppliers to the defense giant. Those firms have, in turn, received more than $750 million in contracts from Lockheed Martin itself — a figure that underscores how the CVC functions as both a strategic scouting arm and a direct feeder into the prime’s sprawling supply chain, according to reporting from Washington Technology.
The fund has historically concentrated on a handful of priority technology verticals that mirror the Pentagon’s modernization agenda. According to the company, the fund has backed pioneering research across quantum computing, autonomy, AI, directed energy, advanced materials and microelectronics. Lockheed Martin Ventures is described by its parent as one of the most active and longest continuously operated aerospace and defense corporate venture capital firms in the United States — a claim backed up by industry trackers that routinely place it in lists of leading defense-tech investors alongside In-Q-Tel, Shield Capital and Lux Capital.
In the past two years alone, 25 companies have been added to the portfolio, reflecting an accelerated deployment pace. The fund’s 9th annual Demo Day is scheduled for August 2026 at Lockheed Martin’s headquarters, where portfolio companies and new startups will engage directly with the prime’s engineering leaders and subject matter experts.
Recent bets: satellites and nuclear microreactors
Recent investments made by Lockheed Martin Ventures include a contribution to a $28 million Series A for Antaris, a Los Altos, California-based developer of an AI-powered platform for designing, simulating, manufacturing and operating satellite missions. The round — announced in early April and led by WestWave Capital — drew participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, alongside other strategic backers. Antaris will use the capital to expand its Antaris Intelligence platform, anchored by its TrueTwin simulation environment, which lets operators “fly” entire missions virtually before committing to specific hardware.
The Antaris investment marks Lockheed Martin’s first check into the five-year-old company, according to Washington Technology. Antaris is already contracted to help Saudi Arabia-focused operator SARsatX build a 16-satellite constellation and is expanding into Japan, giving Lockheed a potential on-ramp into software-defined mission design for allied governments. The startup says its approach cuts time-to-orbit by 2x and lifetime mission costs by 10x compared with traditional methods, according to Payload.
Lockheed Martin Ventures also added its name to the investor roster of Radiant, an El Segundo, California-based developer of portable, mass-produced nuclear microreactors. Radiant completed a $300 million Series D round in December 2025 and disclosed in February that Lockheed Martin’s venture arm had joined as a strategic investor, oversubscribing the round. Radiant’s first product, the 1 MW “Kaleidos” microreactor, is being designed to power remote communities, critical infrastructure and forward-deployed military bases — a use case with obvious pull for the Pentagon. The company plans to start up its first reactor this summer at Idaho National Laboratory’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments facility, with initial customer deployments slated for 2028.
For a prime best known for fighter jets, missile systems and defense electronics, backing portable nuclear power marks a notable widening of Lockheed’s technology aperture — one that dovetails with growing Pentagon interest in resilient off-grid energy for contested environments, Yahoo Finance noted.
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A record year for defense tech funding
The timing of Lockheed’s fund expansion is no accident. Defense tech startups had their best funding year ever in 2025, with venture capital deal value jumping to a record $49.1 billion from $27.2 billion the year before, according to PitchBook data shared with Defense News. Pure equity funding for the sector more than doubled to $17.9 billion, per CB Insights, with the U.S. capturing the lion’s share — equity funding nearly tripled stateside to $14.2 billion from $5 billion a year earlier. European defense tech equity funding, by comparison, climbed a more modest 38% to $2.48 billion.
S&P Global Market Intelligence data tells a similar story: funding rounds for defense-focused startups climbed to a peak of 629 in 2024 from 414 in 2020, with round values hitting $29 billion in 2025 — nearly triple the 2020 total. Even venture capital exits from defense tech investments jumped to a record $54.4 billion last year, up from $18.2 billion in 2024.
Corporate venture activity has ridden the same wave. Corporates invested $5.9 billion in defense tech in 2025 — a 28% increase from 2024 — surpassing the peak recorded during the 2021 CVC boom, according to Global Corporate Venturing data. Booz Allen Hamilton, for instance, lifted its own CVC capacity to $300 million in mid-2025. RTX, Boeing, SAIC, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Maximus and Noblis are all cited by Washington Technology as WT Top 100 contractors that have expanded venture activity in the past decade.
At $1 billion, Lockheed Martin Ventures now towers over most of its peer CVCs. According to one industry database, there are roughly 28 active venture funds specializing in defense tech, managing a combined $18 billion in assets — meaning Lockheed’s single corporate fund now represents about 5.5% of specialized defense VC firepower on its own.
A geopolitics-driven tailwind
The surge in capital is intimately tied to the global security environment. Governments across the U.S. and Europe are boosting defense budgets to replenish munitions stockpiles, modernize industrial bases and field next-generation capabilities amid ongoing conflicts, S&P Global noted. The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2026 budget request totals $961.6 billion in base funding, with an additional $150 billion sought under reconciliation legislation, per analysis by StartUs Insights. The Trump administration has separately floated a $1.5 trillion defense budget proposal for fiscal 2027, cited by Investing.com as a positive signal for primes including Lockheed Martin.
J.P. Morgan research shows the U.S. defense tech investment index reached 791% growth since 2015, significantly outpacing the 409% growth of the broader U.S. venture index. The highest-funded defense tech categories, per PitchBook, include advanced computing and software, autonomous systems and space technology — areas that align neatly with Lockheed Martin Ventures’ stated focus.
PitchBook analyst Ali Javaheri has argued that in 2026, “execution, not invention, will determine returns,” predicting a concerted push to expand manufacturing throughput. Manufacturing-focused defense investment rose to $4.7 billion across 39 deals in 2025, up from $2.6 billion across 24 deals in 2024, per PitchBook data. Javaheri has also flagged the possibility that “a major venture-backed defense tech startup” could be acquired by a prime in the first half of 2026, as incumbents look to “buy proven capabilities rather than build them from scratch.”
Fueling the Lockheed flywheel
For Lockheed Martin, the larger fund is less about chasing venture returns than about building a proprietary pipeline of suppliers, partners and capability options. The company, which reported approximately $75 billion in revenue over the trailing twelve months and carries a market capitalization of roughly $142.8 billion, has seen its stock climb nearly 29% year-to-date and 34% over the past year as of mid-April, according to Investing.com.
The prime has been layering capacity-building moves in parallel. Over the past month alone, Lockheed has unveiled a framework to quadruple Precision Strike Missile production tied to a prior $4.94 billion contract, opened a Rapid Fielding Center to cut prototype timelines, and secured a $4.7 billion PAC-3 MSE production contract, per Stocktitan. Its Orion spacecraft also safely splashed down after NASA’s Artemis II lunar mission.
Lockheed Martin Ventures portrays itself as more than a source of capital — offering portfolio companies access to the prime’s engineering talent, state-of-the-art research facilities and customer relationships. For startups navigating the notorious “Valley of Death” between initial government funding and commercialization, that kind of strategic validation can be as valuable as the check itself. J.P. Morgan has noted that many defense startups struggle to cross from R&D into production, making tie-ups with primes an important de-risking mechanism.
What to watch
The next major milestone for Lockheed Martin Ventures is the August 2026 Demo Day, where the expanded fund is likely to showcase a fresh crop of portfolio companies against the backdrop of its new $1 billion firepower. Industry observers will be watching closely for which technology domains Lockheed prioritizes with the incremental capital — and whether the prime begins writing larger, later-stage checks to hold its own against deep-pocketed pure-play funds like Shield Capital and Overmatch Ventures.
With geopolitical tensions showing no sign of cooling, defense budgets climbing, and allied governments racing to secure domestic critical technology supply chains, Lockheed Martin’s billion-dollar bet on emerging defense innovators looks less like an outlier and more like a signal of what the rest of the primes may soon follow.
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