Navier AI
Hiring
What they do:
Agent-Driven Engineering
Quick facts:
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Top Space & Defense Startups in the United States
This list has 116 startups and was last updated on Oct 15, 2026. 41 of them are hiring right now. Biggest hubs: San Francisco (47), Los Angeles (23), and New York (6). Largest teams: Relativity Space, Astranis, and Stoke Space. Latest round: Onebrief raised $151M (Oct 14, 2026).
116 startupsPage 2 of 4
Theseus
Hiring
What they do:
GPS Denied Navigation for Drones
Quick facts:
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Apolink
Hiring
What they do:
24/7 satellite connectivity in low Earth orbit
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Cascade Space
Hiring
What they do:
Commercial alternative to the Deep Space Network
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Ravn is building a heads-up display for soldiers.
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HQ: Boston, MA, United States
What they do:
Constellations as a Service
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Moon Hotel -> The Intergalactic Construction Company of Earth
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
Edgerun
Hiring
What they do:
Military exoskeletons
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Orca Aerospace
Hiring
What they do:
AI spacecraft operators that lives onboard the vehicle
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Wright Electric
Hiring
What they do:
Boeing for electric planes
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HQ: Albany, NY, United States
What they do:
Flying motorcycles
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
General Astronautics
Hiring
What they do:
Superintelligent space Robots
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Dispatch
Hiring
What they do:
Satellites for Manufacturing in Space
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Perseus Defense
Hiring
What they do:
America's Golden Dome for Drones
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HQ: Austin, TX, United States
Nine Fives
Hiring
What they do:
RF test equipment for next-gen spacecraft, drones, and cellphones
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Arlo Industries
Hiring
What they do:
Track drones and missiles without radars - Accurate, Passive, Scalable
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HQ: New York, NY, United States
What they do:
Autonomous construction on Earth and beyond
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Vernius Systems, Inc.
Hiring
What they do:
Mass-deployable radars for air defense
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Enhanced Radar
Hiring
What they do:
AI for air traffic control
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Synapse Semiconductor
Hiring
What they do:
New semiconductors that merge compute and vision
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HQ: Durham, NC, United States
IMPACT Drones
Hiring
What they do:
Air Defense as a Service for Civilian Infrastructure.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Drone swarm defence at a small-unit level
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Tesseract builds better thrusters for modern satellites
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HQ: Livermore, CA, United States
What they do:
Building persistent, high-performance infrastructure in the sky
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HQ: Seattle, WA, United States
Consus
Hiring
What they do:
The fastest and cheapest way to use AI with ITAR or CUI data.
Quick facts:
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Rocket cargo delivery to contested environments
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
What they do:
Autonomous street sweeping as a service by retro-fitting vehicles
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Search and automation for engineer-to-order companies
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Hypersonic space plane that can take-off from any location and weather
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HQ: Dayton, OH, United States
What they do:
Unified flight software and hardware for the mission of tomorrow
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
The GD&T Analysis Platform for Engineering Drawings
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
A new kind of camera that can see through walls.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Building a nervous system for the atmosphere
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
We're building robot birds for surveillance.
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
What they do:
Building drone swarms that hunt hidden enemies.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Unmanned cargo airplanes
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States