Stellios Enters $5M Pre-Seed With $2M in Signed Microwave Orders

Stellios Technologies announced a $5M pre-seed financing on October 20, 2026, with founder and CEO Richard Starson at the helm of a company selling microwave power systems and using that early hardware work to establish capabilities for a broader power-systems business, including compact fusion research.

The check comes with an unusually commercial footnote for a pre-seed: the company reports entering the financing with $2M in signed customer purchase orders. That figure describes commitments to buy. Delivery, customer acceptance and revenue recognition remain separate questions, and the source material offers no timetable for converting one into the other.

The investor list is long for the stage and includes Sofreh Capital, Wave Function Ventures, Cubit Capital, Mana Ventures, Atoms & Bits, Output Capital and Erik Bruckner, alongside other strategic investors. No single firm is identified as the lead.

What Stellios is actually selling is the Shield line, whose published pilot configurations span 200 kW to 1 MW with vehicle-mounted or stationary deployment, integrated power supplies and an optional diesel generator. The company targets delivery nine months after an order. Those are vendor specifications and a vendor timetable rather than an independently demonstrated operating record — a distinction that matters to any buyer running its own acceptance process.

The optional generator is a small detail that explains the sales problem. A customer weighing a microwave defense system has to decide how to power the equipment, where to mount it and how it will coexist with everything already on site. Stellios' decision to supply both the microwave sources and the systems driving them pulls more of that integration inside a young manufacturer.

The category's appeal and its limits are both documented. A U.S. Government Accountability Office directed-energy assessment from May 2023 notes that electromagnetic systems can offer rapid engagement and potentially lower costs per shot, with some technologies able to affect multiple targets. The same assessment identifies cooling and range constraints and warns that broad-beam microwave effects can reach friendly as well as hostile assets.

Manufacturing sits inside the funding story. Stellios' careers page says its hardware is built primarily in Austin, Texas, and the announcement carries an Austin dateline. Open roles cover high-power microwave sources, high-voltage systems, RF and plasma research, superconducting magnets, technical program management and hands-on fabrication — an outline of the organization it intends to build rather than a completed roster. The company has described plans for domestic research and pilot-manufacturing capacity, with engineering and leadership expansion among the uses of capital.