The first thing you notice on Raven Space Systems' careers portal is a job listing called "Name Your Role." It sits on the same page as openings for a Vice President of Manufacturing, a Materials Scientist, and a Manufacturing Technician [company portal]. For a four-person company [Fabbaloo], that posting reads less like recruiting flair and more like a thesis statement: we are building a factory, the staffing plan is open, tell us where you fit.
That something is a composite 3D printing operation aimed squarely at one of aerospace's least glamorous and most constrained categories: thermal protection systems and lightweight structural parts for spacecraft and defense platforms. Raven, founded in 2020 by Blake Herren and Ryan Cowdrey, is building what it calls smart factories around a patent-pending process it has named Microwave Assisted Deposition, or MAD [Explorium]. The pitch is that MAD can rapidly produce aerospace-grade thermoset and ceramic composites with less labor, less tooling, and less waste than the autoclave-and-handcraft workflows that still dominate the industry [EDC]. The headline application is striking: silicon and silicon carbide parts for space travel, printed rather than machined [Forbes], including components for return capsules [City Entrepreneur Podcast].
The bet
Raven's wedge is the heat shield. Reentry vehicles need ablative or ceramic composite surfaces that can survive thousands of degrees, and historically those parts have been the bottleneck in any high-cadence return-to-Earth program. The company says it is preparing to sell parts produced on an industrial-scale printer with a cubic meter build volume [SpaceNews]. Customers, for now, are the United States government and its prime contractors. Raven has signed research agreements with NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory [SpaceNews] and has pulled in roughly $4.5 million in non-dilutive contracts from the Air Force, NASA, and others since 2020 [BizWest], including a $1.8 million STTR Phase II award from AFWERX in November 2024 [Startland News].
That non-dilutive base is the quiet story here. Raven has stacked more than $1 million in SBIR/STTR contracts to date according to Factories in Space, and a separate accounting from NSIN puts $1.5 million in non-dilutive funding from NASA, AFWERX, and the National Science Foundation. On top of that, Colorado's Economic Development Commission approved up to $5,852,666 in performance-based Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits over eight years, tied to the company's plan to bring 392 jobs to Broomfield [Area Development] [BizWest].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| STTR Phase II (AFWERX, Nov 2024) | $1,800,000 |
| Non-dilutive (NASA, AFWERX, NSF) | $1,500,000 |
| Pre-Seed equity (Nov 2024) | $2,000,000 |
| Total non-dilutive contracts since 2020 | $4,500,000 |
| CO Job Growth Tax Credit (8-yr ceiling) | $5,852,666 |
Why it could be big
The market context is unusually favorable. The Department of Defense has spent the last three years explicitly pushing money toward domestic advanced manufacturing, and the reentry and hypersonics portfolios in particular have a documented shortage of qualified thermal protection suppliers. A startup that can print certified silicon carbide parts at capsule scale steps into a category where the incumbent options are RTX, Airbus, and Lockheed Martin. Raven's bet is that 3D printing collapses the lead time and the unit economics enough that a new tier of customer, the commercial reentry and on-orbit services operators, becomes viable.
The $2 million pre-seed Raven closed on November 20, 2024 [Crunchbase] is small by space hardware standards, but the cap table is purposeful: Backswing Ventures, 46 Venture Capital, Mana Ventures, What If Ventures, and Cape Fear Ventures. Combined with the Colorado tax credit package and the AFWERX Phase II, the company has assembled the kind of blended capital stack that hardware founders increasingly need to survive the gap between prototype and first production line.
The team
Herren, the CEO, completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Oklahoma; Cowdrey, the co-founder and chief technology officer, holds a master's in mechanical engineering from the same program [Forbes]. The open VP of Manufacturing role in Broomfield is the most interesting recruiting signal: it suggests the company is preparing to translate research-grade output into a repeatable production line.
What the bears say
The credible concern is execution risk at scale. Aerospace-grade ceramic composites have to be qualified part by part, program by program, and the gap between a printed coupon that survives a test and a flight-qualified heat shield is measured in years and millions of dollars. SpaceNews has reported Raven's plan to begin selling parts from its cubic meter printer, but qualification timelines for thermal protection on crewed or high-value uncrewed vehicles are notoriously long, and primes like Lockheed Martin and RTX have decades of qualified-supplier relationships that a four-person startup cannot replicate quickly. The bull answer is that Raven is not trying to displace those primes; it is trying to be the supplier inside their bills of materials, and the AFWERX Phase II plus the NASA and AFRL research agreements are exactly the on-ramps that turn a process patent into a qualified part number.
What to watch
The next twelve months should answer two questions. First, does the cubic meter printer ship parts to a paying customer, and who is that customer? Second, does the Broomfield headcount actually start climbing toward the 392-job commitment that unlocks the Colorado tax credits? A Series A in 2025 or early 2026 would be the natural next milestone, and the identity of the lead investor will say a lot about whether the defense-tech generalists or the deep-tech specialists believe MAD is the real thing.