Ravyn aims to distrupt missile sector

SAN FRANCISCO – Washington-based Ravyn Technology Corp. is developing low-cost missiles propelled by solid rocket motors.

The company, established in 2019, aims to bring down the cost of missiles tenfold with its Mobile Mass Missile System. The sector “needs to be disrupted to create more competition in the market,” Ravyn founder Saad Mirza told SpaceNews.

Ravyn missiles are designed to travel 1,600 kilometers in space, reaching speeds of Mach 10 or higher, before gliding on reentry for extended range.

Ravyn is not alone in seeing market demand for hypersonic weapons and solid rocket motors. Castelion, a California startup developing hypersonic missiles, raised $100 million in a recent Series A investment round. X-Bow Systems of New Mexico, secured $70 million in Series B funding to produce solid rocket motors and small launch vehicles. And Defense contractor Anduril Industries entered the solid rocket motor business in 2023 through its acquisition of Adranos.

The Defense Department has “expressed interest to allow the more ‘non-traditional defense industry partners’ to become part of the Defense Industrial Base,” Alfred Abramson III, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and Ravyn business development advisor, said by email. Startups inject resiliency into the Defense Industrial Base by increasing competition, offering second sources and boosting domestic manufacturing, Abramson added.

Vertical Integration

Ravyn is working to slash the cost of missiles through design simplification, economies of scale and vertical integration.

“Legacy manufacturers, while providing world-class systems, have created intricate designs which have proven very expensive to manufacture,” Loginn Kapitan, Ravyn vice president engineering and a former Leidos vice president, said by email. “This has resulted in a high-cost low-volume missile environment for the United States Department of Defense. Ravyn seeks to turn that reality on its head by creating uncomplicated design solutions which facilitate high-volume production at a much lower cost to the taxpayer.”

Kapitan, a former Ravyn advisor, said he joined the company full-time after noting Mirza’s “vision, impressive skill set, business acumen, dogged determination and capacity to handle a myriad of details.”

While at Princeton University studying aerospace engineering, Mirza led a student team that sent a small rocket to an altitude of 84 kilometers. While still in school, he also founded Ravyn.  

To date, Ravyn has designed a 2.75-inch air-to-air missile and conducted a static-fire test of a 2.75-inch rocket motor in Mojave, California.

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