The first thing you notice about Raven Space Systems is the verb on its homepage: modernizing. Not disrupting, not reinventing. Modernizing. It is the right word for what cofounders Blake Herren and Ryan Cowdrey are trying to do, which is take one of the most conservative supply chains in American manufacturing (composite parts for aerospace and defense) and run it through a 3D printer they patented themselves.
That printer has a name worth knowing: Microwave Assisted Deposition, or MAD. It is the technical wedge underneath everything else Raven is building, and it is the reason a four-year-old company with $2 million in pre-seed funding is being courted by state economic development offices [Crunchbase, Nov 2024].
The bet
Raven sells composite parts and the smart factories that make them, with a focus on thermal protection systems and lightweight structures for spacecraft, hypersonics, and defense platforms [Capital Factory]. The MAD process, which the company holds a patent on, uses microwave energy to cure composites during deposition rather than relying on the traditional autoclave step [Startland News, Nov 2024]. In an industry where lead times for composite tooling are measured in quarters, compressing the cure cycle is the kind of operational change a program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory actually cares about.
That is, in fact, who is buying. Raven has pulled in roughly $4.5 million in non-dilutive contracts from the Air Force, NASA, and the National Science Foundation since 2020, including $1 million in SBIR grants [BizWest, Aug 2025]. The largest single award disclosed is a $1.8 million contract via AFWERX, the Air Force's innovation arm [Startland News, Nov 2024]. For a company that has only raised $2 million in equity, the ratio of government revenue to dilutive capital is unusual, and it tells you something about how the founders are choosing to fund the business.
Why it could be big
The market context is favorable in a way it was not five years ago. The Department of Defense has been explicit about wanting domestic, additive-manufactured alternatives to legacy composite suppliers, particularly for hypersonic vehicles where thermal protection is a binding constraint. NASA's Artemis program and the broader commercial space cadence have created sustained demand for lightweight structures. A startup that can show a patented process, active research agreements with NASA and AFRL, and a path to a production-grade smart factory is sitting in a category that primes are actively scouting [SpaceNews].
The move to Broomfield is a bet on that thesis. Raven announced it is relocating its headquarters from Kansas City to Colorado, with plans to bring 392 new jobs to Broomfield at an average annual wage of $130,867, roughly 119% of the county average [Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade]. Broomfield sits inside one of the densest aerospace clusters in the country, with Lockheed Martin, Sierra Space, Maxar, and Ball Aerospace all within a short drive. The hiring plan is ambitious for a pre-seed company, but it is the kind of commitment that unlocks state incentives and signals to defense customers that the company intends to build at scale.
The pre-seed round closed in November 2024 with What If Ventures, Mana Ventures, FortySix Venture Capital, Backswing Ventures, and Cape Fear Ventures on the cap table [Crunchbase, Nov 2024]. None of those names are household-brand deeptech funds, but the syndicate is coherent for a company at this stage, and the non-dilutive contract base means the equity capital can stretch further than the headline figure suggests.
Non-dilutive contracts since 2020 | 4.5 | $M
AFWERX contract | 1.8 | $M
SBIR grants | 1.0 | $M
Pre-seed equity raised | 2.0 | $M
The team and traction
Herren and Cowdrey were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 in the Manufacturing & Industry category, recognition that tracks with the patent, the contract base, and the state's willingness to back the relocation [Forbes, Dec 2024]. Herren is the technical lead behind the MAD process; Cowdrey has been the public-facing voice on the company's commercial and policy work [Startland News, Dec 2024]. The Forbes nod matters less for prestige than for what it implies about deal flow: it is now meaningfully easier for the founders to get a meeting with a Series A fund or a prime contractor's corporate venture arm.
Traction beyond contracts is harder to read from outside, but the trajectory is consistent. The company moved from a West Bottoms workshop in Kansas City to a planned smart factory in Colorado in roughly four years, with Air Force and NASA research agreements in hand and a patent issued [Startland News, Aug 2025].
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is the one every deeptech hardware company faces. Scaling a novel manufacturing process from research contracts to qualified production parts is where most composite startups stall, and $2 million in equity is modest relative to the capital intensity of standing up a factory and hiring 392 people [Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade]. The bull answer is in the structure of the revenue: Raven has been funding R&D through Air Force and NASA dollars rather than venture equity, which is exactly the playbook defense-tech investors now look for, and the Colorado relocation comes with state support that reduces the cash burden of the build-out [BizWest, Aug 2025]. Whether the smart factory hits its qualification milestones on the timeline the hiring plan implies is the question that will determine the next round.
What to watch
The next twelve months should bring three things into focus: the first production milestones from the Broomfield facility, the conversion of at least one AFRL or NASA research agreement into a program-of-record component contract, and almost certainly a seed or seed-extension round to fund the hiring ramp. If any of the primes building hypersonic or reentry vehicles announces Raven as a tier-two supplier, the story changes quickly.
The cultural question Raven is implicitly answering is whether the next generation of American aerospace manufacturing gets built by the incumbents retooling, or by founders in their twenties printing it from scratch in a Broomfield warehouse.