Hercules Capital, Trinity Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, and Pinegrove Venture Partners have provided Hermeus with $150 million of debt. The facility sits inside a $350 million Series C, announced on 7 April 2026, which also includes $200 million of equity led by Khosla Ventures.
Hermeus develops high-Mach unmanned aircraft. The United States company said the capital will move it from prototype work to mission-ready platforms, support the scaling of a fleet and start customer payload integration.
Hermeus is opening a headquarters in El Segundo, California, and shifting its Atlanta site to production.
AJ Piplica, Founder and Chief Executive of Hermeus, said: "This new funding lets us build multiple aircraft at the same time and scale our manufacturing capabilities."
Hermeus said the round brings its total capital to more than $500 million and values the company at $1 billion post-money.
Khosla led the equity, with existing backers Canaan Partners, Founders Fund, RTX Ventures, Bling Capital and In-Q-Tel returning. New investors included Cox Enterprises and Socium Ventures, Destiny Tech100, the Georgia Tech Foundation, 137 Ventures and GSBackers.
The Series C follows a $100 million Series B led by Sam Altman in March 2022 and a $16 million Series A led by Canaan in October 2020.
Hercules reported $3.92 billion of new debt and equity commitments and $2.28 billion of gross fundings in 2025. At 31 December 2025 the San Mateo firm had about $5.7 billion of assets under management. It has committed more than $25 billion to more than 700 companies since December 2003.
Trinity originated $2.1 billion of new commitments and funded $1.5 billion of investments in 2025. At year-end the Phoenix alternative asset manager had $2.8 billion of platform assets under management and an investment portfolio of about $2.4 billion across 176 companies.
SVB and Pinegrove announced a lending relationship in March 2025, saying they expected to deploy a combined $2.5 billion of venture debt. Pinegrove, backed by Brookfield and Sequoia Heritage, reported combined assets under management of more than $10 billion after buying SVB Capital in 2024. The pair have collectively committed more than $10 billion of venture debt across 550 loans.