Western Alliance Bank has provided a facility to Aventra Defense Systems as part of a $17.5m fundraise led by Konvoy.
The size of the facility was not disclosed, and the company did not say how the $17.5m was split between equity and the facility.
Existing investor Lavrock Ventures participated, alongside new investors Booz Allen Ventures, Sands Capital and Langford Industries.
Aventra Defense Systems is a US defence technology company founded in 2025 and headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. Its three founders are former Army officers Michael Weigand, who is chief executive, Brian Retherford and Jessup Meng.
Its first platform, Piranha, is a low-cost, balloon-deployed autonomous precision payload system for ISR, electronic warfare and kinetic missions from stratospheric altitudes. Aventra says Piranha has been used in the US Army’s Arcane Thunder 26 exercise and in evaluations and tests with other US, allied and partner military units, across 400 flights.
Aventra said proceeds will support the move from field-evaluation quantities of Piranha into low-rate initial production, including expanded capacity at its Herndon production facility. The company also plans to expand flight testing and demonstrations, qualify new payload and communications configurations, grow engineering and production teams, and begin work on an unannounced platform.
The financing follows Aventra’s emergence from stealth in October 2025 with $3m of seed funding led by Lavrock Ventures.
Denver-based Konvoy has made more than 60 portfolio investments and is investing from its $150m Fund III. Western Alliance Bank lends to venture-backed technology and life sciences companies through its Innovation Banking Group. The Aventra release did not state which division of the bank provided the facility.