Castelion

Hard to solve if you haven't thought of them ahead of time.

I know you're very ambitious, but can companies like Castilian and Anduril truly become the next primes, or are they always gonna be second to the Raytheons and the Lockheeds of the world?

No. They'll, will absolutely become the other primes.

What needs to happen? What are the main risks?

From a Anduril and Castilian perspective, I think we're over the initial hurdles of will we be capitalized enough to make it? We have the capital to make it, and so now the risk shifts to execution risk.

The thing that really seals kind of the deal for the government is to do the thing you said you would do, which in kind of both companies' cases, I would say, is really to enter production and to start fielding systems at scale that solve some of the country's critical national security challenges.

Anduril's obviously an older company than us, and they're further ahead of us, but if you do that and you enter production and you do that well, the success is all but ours for the taking.

And I think that it's, like, quite critical that at the same time, we also solve some of the issues with the speed to development, the cost of these systems, and producing enough quantity that it actually achieves the desired effect, which is deterrence.

And This is definitively a dual-use capability.

The other defense investment of note is definitively not a dual-use capability, and it is Castilian, which raised $800 million in equity and I think just over a billion dollars in all the mechanisms and vehicles that were put together in the round and emerged from that as a $13 billion category leader in the hypersonic space.

It was led by A16Z with participation or co-leadership by Carlyle and JP Morgan and a range of others.

But they've taken money from folks friendly with our company, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Altimeter, and others.

And in fact, you know, 85 to 90% of all venture leaders.

activity in the defense space over the past 18 months has gone to the top 10 or so category defining or category leading non-traditional defense contractors.

And that is no different for Castilian that is making waves and fully vertically integrated hypersonic capability.

Maybe some quick comments before we close out Simon.