For most of the last fifty years, almost nobody started an energetics company. The chemistry is unforgiving, the permits take years, and demand rose and fell with each conflict. That has changed. Allied governments now treat energetics as critical chemicals, and a new class of startups is going after the problem at every layer: the reactors, the precursors, the plants, the warheads, and the way production gets deployed.

The Toolmakers: Changing How Nitration Happens

Chemtrix is not a defense startup, but it may matter as much as any of them. The company grew out of flow chemistry research at the University of Hull and was incorporated as Chemtrix BV in 2008 on the Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Geleen, the Netherlands. Its Plantrix modular reactors are built from silicon carbide and designed for fast, highly exothermic reactions with aggressive media, nitrations included, at up to 400 kg per hour per module. Running nitration in continuous flow instead of large batch vats means far less material in process at any moment and much tighter control of heat.

AT Process Technologies (ATP) applies the same idea to full production. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, ATP is building autonomous, skidded production modules that run continuously and generate little to no waste.

Synthio Chemicals of Boulder, Colorado, was founded in 2017 and runs a proprietary continuous flow platform for chemicals that are hard to make safely at scale, including propellant binding agents, stabilizers, high-nitrogen precursors, and energetic plasticizers and binders. It was among the companies selected for an SBA Critical Suppliers award in September 2026.

The Chemists: Rebuilding the Precursor Layer

Ohr calls itself an emerging chemical prime. Its "Creationary Chemistry" approach pairs selective synthesis with continuous flow to build energetics, propellants and binders from abundant feedstocks rather than refining them out of crude.

Athanor is building domestic specialty nitrogen chemistry, led by founder Alexander Cortes with Purdue's Davin Piercey as chief science officer. It starts with a commercially proven compound, creatine, and aims to control upstream precursors like cyanamide and sarcosine, with defense among the markets it plans to expand into.

ChemPilot brings AI to the molecule itself. A spin-out from Prof. Alon Grinberg Dana's lab at the Technion in Israel, it combines physics-based and quantum simulation, machine learning and AI agents to find new energetic and propellant materials, and sends labs only candidates that can actually be made. The company says this compresses a process that normally takes ten years or more into months.

The Sovereign Builders: New Plants for Allied Supply

CellCore Technologies is building Canada's first Indigenous-owned nitrocellulose and energetics facility in Saskatchewan as the anchor tenant of a defence manufacturing campus developed with Des Nedhe Group Defence. The plan calls for 6,000 MT of nitrocellulose a year, with groundbreaking targeted for Q4 2026 and first offtake production in Q1 2029. CellCore is also rethinking the feedstock, pairing prairie flax straw with dissolving wood pulp, and says its first three years of output are already pre-sold.

Verkan, the Wallenberg-owned Swedish venture, is planning a propellant plant at Björneborg near Kristinehamn that would make its own nitrocellulose, nitroesters and ether. Verkan filed its environmental permit application in June 2026 and is targeting a 2027 construction start and more than 1,000 tonnes a year from 2028.

Sterling Energetics is proposing a vertically integrated campus in central Alberta, called Iron Willow, in cooperation with the Samson Cree Nation. The concept runs the whole chain from Canadian forestry feedstock to cellulose, nitrocellulose, nitroglycerin and finished double-base propellant.

Swebal (Sweden Ballistics) is building Sweden's first TNT plant in roughly thirty years in Nora, central Sweden, sized for up to 4,500 metric tonnes of flaked TNT a year. Its environmental permit gained legal force in July 2026 after a fight that reached the Supreme Court, groundworks started on October 19, 2026, and TNT deliveries are planned for the second half of 2028.

The Distributed Model: Modular Production and Warheads

Critical Materials Group (CMG) of Austin, Texas, raised a $10.3M seed round led by Overmatch Ventures in September 2026 to bring its first modular, automated production system online in 2027. It already makes Composition-4 at a Texas facility, and in October it acquired Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory, bringing formulation and testing in house under a combined team of nearly 60.

Deterrence of Fremont, California, calls what it does building robots that make explosives. Founded by Dhruva Rajendra and Brian Jones, both formerly of Latch, with Henry Olgers, a former Tesla battery manufacturing lead, it uses computer vision, machine learning and robotics to automate production of explosives, propellants and primers, aiming to improve safety, quality and scale. It closed a $10.1M seed round led by Riot Ventures.

Odin Energetics is a joint venture between Solugen and Kraken Kinetics with $115 million committed to produce HMX and RDX in containerized plants it says can be stood up in six months near bases and test ranges. Holston Army Ammunition Plant remains the sole US producer of both. Odin says it could make limited deliveries next year; as of late October 2026, no Army or Pentagon supply contract had been announced.

Warheads are where the drone boom meets energetics. In spring 2026 the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program ran a Lethality Prize Challenge for cheap, mass-producible payloads for small drones. The winners, Bravo Ordnance, Kela, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse Solutions and Northrop Grumman, became the preferred lethality providers paired with Gauntlet drone makers, and most of them are startups.

Kraken Kinetics, founded in 2023 in Pinehurst, North Carolina, designs warheads, fuzing and safe-and-arm devices for unmanned platforms. Its Terminus warhead has been used operationally in Ukraine and identified as the payload on several Gauntlet-winning drones. Odin gives it a path upstream into the explosives that go inside them.

Bravo Ordnance works from Bastrop County, Texas, designing and 3D printing custom warheads for loitering munitions, drones and uncrewed vessels, with a stated turnaround of two weeks or less from idea to prototype. Its Gemini is a transport-safe binary explosive with TNT-equivalent performance.

Kela is an Israeli defense startup founded in mid-2024 and backed by Sequoia, Lux and In-Q-Tel. Known for its open battlefield software platform, it has moved into drone payloads and integration, and its Lethality Prize win was the first public sign of its munitions work.

Mountain Horse Solutions, a Colorado Springs company that is part of Global Ordnance, packages modular warheads, safe-and-arm systems and remote initiation into kits that turn small drones into one-way attack or drop munitions. It also handles explosives licensing, storage and transport so drone makers can stay focused on airframes.

Also on the Radar

Estes Energetics acquired Goex and is reviving black powder production in Minden, Louisiana. On the propulsion side, X-Bow and Firehawk are 3D printing motors and propellant grains, Ursa Major is selling solid rocket motors as an independent supplier, and Castelion is vertically integrating hypersonic strike weapons.

What Ties Them Together

These companies are attacking different layers, but they share a thesis: energetics should be built like a modern chemical industry. That means continuous processes instead of batch, more than one feedstock, plants sited where supply is needed, and private capital moving at private speed.

The hard parts have not gone away. Permits still take years. Qualification still runs material, component and system separately, service by service. And a plant only survives on steady offtake, not on a single surge. The startups that make it will be the ones that solve the chemistry and the business model at the same time. It is the most interesting moment for this industry in a generation.