Defense aviation has been stuck for decades. nvp capital bet on Reaxiomatic to fix it.

nvp capital co-ledReaxiomatic's $7.25M pre-seed round alongsideScout Ventures, with participation fromBling Capital.

It started the way the best investments do: not with a sector thesis, but with a founder.

nvp capital's Thesis: Vertical AI Meets Physical Infrastructure

At nvp capital, we spend most of our time in vertical AI, looking for founders with earned domain expertise who can bring technical talent to a painful, under-digitized workflow and build something durable. Over the past couple of years that lens has been pulling us toward hardware and robotic applications.

We've written before about why physical AI is having its defining moment - the convergence of better robotics hardware, cheaper sensors, and increasingly capable foundation models is making autonomous physical systems viable in ways they simply weren't three years ago. Defense tech startups that can operate at the intersection of modern manufacturing and autonomous systems are rare. The ones led by founders who have actually built and flown aircraft inside a startup are rarer still.

But with Reaxiomatic, it wasn't the sector that came first. It was Skyler.

The Founder: Skyler Shuford, Hermeus Co-Founder and Defense Aviation Veteran

We are unusually founder-focused at nvp capital. At the pre-seed stage, the founder largely is the thesis - their domain knowledge, their network, their willingness to grind when things get hard. That framing is especially true in defense, where the customer relationship, the procurement cycle, and the technical requirements are unlike any other market.

Skyler Shuford is one of the rarest profiles we've encountered in defense tech. He was one of the four co-founders of Hermeus - the hypersonic aircraft startup that has raised over $500M from Khosla Ventures and others and is currently valued as a unicorn. At Hermeus, Skyler's role expanded continuously, starting as COO across operations, safety, and marketing, then taking ownership of all technical teams, and ultimately becoming President overseeing hardware integration and end-to-end jet manufacturing. He knows what it takes to go from a blank sheet of paper to a flying aircraft, inside a startup, selling to the U.S. government.

Before Hermeus, Skyler served as Director of Avionics and Software at Generation Orbit, leading technical development of flight and ground electronics and software systems for the X-60A - an Air Force X-Plane for hypersonic flight research. He has also held roles at SpaceX, Aerospace Corporation, Northrop Grumman, and Aerojet. He holds an MS in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State and a BS from Cal Poly.

There are very few people in the world with the combined credibility, network, and operating experience to build a new defense aerospace company outside of a Prime contractor. Skyler is one of them - and now he's back, building his own company from the ground up.

The Best Reveals Are Worth the Wait

When we first sat down with Skyler, conviction came quickly. The problem Reaxiomatic is going after is real, structural, and sits inside a massive, well-funded government market. The manufacturing and technology moment makes a new approach viable in ways it simply wasn't a few years ago. And the founder has lived this problem from the inside.

Reaxiomatic is operating in stealth, but here's what we can say: they have a hangar and office space in San Diego, giving them plenty of room for what Skyler calls "heavy attritables for critical defense infrastructure." As he explained to Axios: "At Hermeus, we built an organization that can design, build and fly brand-new jets from scratch in about a year - about eight times faster than any near-peers. A similar playbook can, and must, be applied to other critical defense systems."

That's the vision. And we believe him.

When we find exceptional founders taking on important problems, we move early and work hard to earn the right to partner with them. That's exactly what happened here.

Congratulations to Skyler and the entire Reaxiomatic team. We're proud to be part of the journey. Read Reax's announcement or the full Axios exclusive by Colin Demarest for more.