For years, Will Somerindyke sold weapons of war around the world: artillery shells to Ukraine, grenades to U.S.-backed rebels in Syria. With relationships with dozens of top military buyers, he quickly turned his company Regulus Global into one of America’s major international arms dealers.
Now, as Silicon Valley investors swarm to back multi-billion dollar defense startups with increasing fervor, Somerindyke is looking to make the jump from munitions middleman to manufacturer. He’s been quietly working on Union, a new venture-backed startup he claims will modernize ammunition factories with autonomous robotics and precision machining.
“I’ve been through a lot in 18 years in this space,” Somerindyke told Forbes. “If Union does its job correctly, we will be building millions of square feet of facilities with the ability to make a wide range of defense products.”
Union, which Somerindyke leads as CEO, appears to have made a solid start. In April it secured a massive $50 million seed funding round led by Bravo Victor Venture Capital, or BVVC. Other investors include Silent Ventures, IronGate, and RKKVC, a Poland-based single-family office. It plans to open its first artillery shell factory in Texas next month. And it recently secured a contract to sell those shells, which, if fulfilled, could bring in up to $225 million, according to Somerindyke.
But instead of approaching the problem with old-school manufacturing, Somerindyke and Musselman, who met more than a decade ago through a program for veterans, saw an opportunity to modernize weapons manufacturing, are using Silicon Valley software talent to implement autonomous systems. Since incorporating in October, Union has hired a suite of engineers from Tesla, SpaceX and Anduril.
Musselman has touted recent momentum to “reindustrialize” America and bring manufacturing back to the U.S. as necessary to combatting China’s manufacturing superiority. Other companies have joined the effort, including Hadrian, which does autonomous manufacturing, and Re:Build, a Massachusetts-based company that has been acquiring mom-and-pop factories and modernizing them; both could compete with Union’s entry into the market. Mussleman has also invested in other defense companies; after starting BVVC in 2023, he has written checks into drone company Firestorm and autonomous submarine startup Vatn Systems.
At the Texas facility, set to open this month, Union hopes to produce more than 300,000 shells next year, according to a company pitch deck shared with seed investors in January. By 2030, Union has told its investors, it plans to produce nine million shells a year, which it hopes will generate $3.5 billion in revenue.
Those are lofty figures. But Musselman sees the ongoing turbulence in the world — conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East — as proof of Union’s thesis. “We are running at a deficit of stockpiles or anything that goes boom around the world,” he said. “And that's going to be a leverage point for our adversaries.”