Venus Aerospace raises $90 million Series B to build a new type of rocket engine

Build a new kind of rocket engine, and the world will make a path to your door. Or at least that’s how it worked Venus Aviation And its rotary rocket engine (RDRE), which is an extremely efficient way to launch objects into the sky.

It was the company Founded in 2020 was founded by husband and wife duo, CEO Sassy Douglby and CTO Andrew Doglby, with the idea of ​​developing clean-flying hypersonic aircraft for passenger travel. But after successfully demonstrating the engine last year, their plans changed.

“What happened when we flew last May is that the world looked at us and said, ‘Oh my God, you have a working RDRE, would you sell us one?’ “This was not what we expected,” Sassy Douglby told TechCrunch.

Now, the company is focusing on developing hypersonic weapons, replacing the solid rocket motors that power many rockets with their own, and high-speed spacecraft that are attractive to the military.

“Our propulsion architecture combines efficiency, bottleneck, reusability and manufacturability in a way
“Customers need real defense and space missions,” Andrew Douglby said in a statement. “We are focused on translating technical advances into reliable systems for practical use.”

Venus today announced a $90 million Series B round aimed at putting the company in a position to do just that by funding testing and development work on specific vehicle designs with potential customers. The funding round was led by Mercury Fund and saw participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, MESH, PEAK6, and Draper.
Partners, Starboard Star Venture Capital, and Green Sands Equity.

RDRE was conceived in the mid-20th century as a theoretically more efficient means of launching missiles; Instead of burning propellant in a circular chamber, the engine creates a continuous supersonic combustion wave that circulates through a circular channel. (here Visualization.) The idea promised to waste less propellant, but the complex physics proved difficult to understand and control.

This has changed in recent years, with the advent of 3D printing and better simulations. The first working test was conducted in 2020 at the University of Central Florida. NASA Proven RDRE on Earth for the first time in 2022, while the Japanese space agency JAXA I fired one For a few seconds in space in 2021. The 2025 Venus test was the first time RDRE has launched a rocket in flight.

“When we first started Venus, the whole story was that there was a new type of rocket engine that we thought would put out more heat and more thrust and be more efficient, but we thought we knew how to keep it from melting,” Sassie Douglby said. “This has been a big part of our work over the last four years — how do we keep this engine from melting down — and we’ve solved that problem.”

This year, the company received a grant from the Texas Space Commission to build a new, larger test platform. This will be key for Venus: The longest it has run its engine during 600 tests is 32 seconds, but it will likely need to burn for at least 6 to 15 minutes to meet its customers’ goals.