Stellios exits stealth with $5M pre-seed and $2M in signed microwave orders

Stellios Technologies came out of stealth on October 20, 2026 with a $5M pre-seed round, and it arrived with an unusual piece of supporting evidence: the company reports entering the financing with $2M in signed customer purchase orders. Those are commitments to buy rather than delivered hardware — delivery, customer acceptance and revenue recognition remain separate questions — but they give the raise a commercial anchor that most pre-seed hardware stories do not carry.

The company builds microwave power systems. Its Shield pilot configurations are published at 200 kW to 1 MW, in vehicle-mounted or stationary form, with integrated power supplies and an optional diesel generator, and Stellios targets delivery nine months after an order. That optional generator is a reminder of how much of a directed-energy sale is ordinary site work: a buyer has to decide how to power the equipment, where to mount it and how it operates alongside everything already installed.

Investors in the round include Sofreh Capital, Wave Function Ventures, Cubit Capital, Mana Ventures, Atoms & Bits, Output Capital and Erik Bruckner, alongside other strategic investors. The source material does not name a single lead.

Stellios intends to use early microwave hardware work to establish capabilities for a broader power-systems business, including compact fusion research. The company has described plans for domestic research and pilot-manufacturing capacity, with engineering and leadership expansion among the uses of capital. Its careers page says hardware is built primarily in Austin, Texas, where the funding announcement also carries a dateline, though the site still carries an El Segundo, California footer elsewhere. Open roles span high-power microwave sources, high-voltage systems, RF and plasma research, superconducting magnets, technical program management and hands-on fabrication — a list describing the organization Stellios wants to build rather than a completed roster.

The category's trade-offs are well documented. The U.S. Government Accountability Office's May 2023 directed-energy assessment notes that electromagnetic systems can offer rapid engagement and potentially lower costs per shot, with some technologies able to affect multiple targets. It also flags cooling and range constraints, and warns that broad-beam microwave effects can reach friendly as well as hostile assets. Stellios' choice to supply both the microwave sources and the systems driving them pulls more of that integration inside one young manufacturer.

A second thread runs through the company's engineering stack. Its Genesis platform bundles AI-assisted CAD, circuit work, research and physics analysis into a local engineering environment, used internally and offered to other engineers and researchers. Stellios describes it as experimental, with no guarantees or service-level commitments, and says full finite-element and multiphysics simulation remain in development. The longer-term plan connects the microwave business to Stellios Core, its compact-fusion program, on the argument that capabilities in magnets, vacuum systems, power electronics and controls carry across both. Wave Function Ventures' portfolio independently lists Stellios under directed energy and compact fusion. No commercial fusion output has been established in the reviewed material.