Divergent raises $290M to scale AI-driven defense manufacturing, ships 10th hypercar

It's the week of the series e overnight. Overnight success to see it. Thank you so much for coming on. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Awesome. And our next guest is in the reream waiting room. We have Lucas Singer again from Divergent. I wanted him to drive one of his supercars into the Ultimate.

I know. I know. And and and I've heard uh unsubstantiated rumors that he might be down for that at some point. Couldn't make it happen today. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Lucas? Good to see you. Great to see you. Doing great today. Kick us off. Did you raise a series what now? Series C. Series E. Series E.

There we go. How much? Yeah. Late stage $290 million series. Boom. Congratulations. Three triple. Uh, it's a hattick of series E today on the show. Uh, congratulations. Um, uh, what does that unlock? What's the next phase of divergent accelerating this platform that we've built?

So really taking this into scale manufacturing with a focus on defense work. As you might remember, we started an automotive or deep technology business. We've built this over a decade. But now it's really unlocking additional capacity.

capacity to make the most meaningful uh frankly weapon systems primarily in the world and to supply those to our great prime customers and to the US government directly to add over 50,000 square feet to this campus in Los Angeles but then also uh to fund um the buildout of our future facilities across the US.

How are you thinking about the footprint of that buildout across the US? Um, we've heard that famous story about uh there's there's an F-35 part that's made in every single congressional district. Maybe it's a coincidence. It does seem like it's important to have a balanced uh footprint across the US.

Uh what's the courtship process like? Is it based on tax incentives or uh local uh talent? How do you think about picking a new uh territory to expand to? Yeah, we think about where we can have the most impact for the nation.

So, where can we be closest to the customer that's making a product that we can truly be helpful with? And what is the greatest concentration of products and customers? Where is that in the US? And that's where we want to be.

And internationally, we think along those same lines, but also strategically, if we're going to be near a theater, where does it really make sense to have a facility? And the beauty of these factories is um they are digitally defined, right?

You've got hardware that can go from making auto parts to defense parts backto back with no downtime in between. So you can be driving a capacitybased model and you can make almost any part, any assembly, one factory, any product. That's our marketing uh tagline because that quite literally is what this system unlocks.

And we're not ready to say exactly what states we're going to. We've got conversations with multiple, but it's really about the government customer and the prime customer and of course, yes, the economics and the incentive that we can get uh in that location.

I imagine people are competing to win win you over in terms of off you know trying to create the best environment for for a divergent. Is that is that correct? Oh yeah. Yes, absolutely. And the states get competitive. You also see the congressional side of this.

you see the various stakeholders get involved and um you want to be first as well. You want to show that your state or your um exact county is on the forefront of this and they're bringing digital manufacturing. They're bringing the next generation of that to um their location.

So yes, we're we're seeing thankfully uh a lot of demand, a lot of interest and and a lot of uh support for these facilities. Fantastic. Talk about the actual integration with the customer. You said you want to be you want to deliver value to them. Uh what are the considerations of actually being near a customer?

Is that like they're going to have forward deployed engineers in your organization, you're going to have forward deployed engineers in their organization?

Is it actually beneficial to be like walk across the street or is it drive across the town or is it like I need to be near a big airport that's a hub that everyone can fly in and out of? Uh I'm not I'm not trying to do 20 questions to figure out where you're going.

I'm actually just interested in like the business of how you decide where to build and what you want. You made my job easy. You gave half the answer there. So, I appreciate that. But, um, no, uh, it's really partially logistics as well for our customers.

So, if you think about one of the large primes, they're going to end up doing the integration, say, of a missile system. Integration meaning they're going to put the avionics in it. They're going to um put the payload in it. They're going to do um whatever their end of line testing procedure is, right?

And if we as the primary structure supplier that's making that full airframe for them can be right adjacent to their general assembly facility, that's a huge win for them, right? And that's almost obvious in how you want to architect your production process for a complex system like that.

So as um being adjacent to these primes, right?

like walking distance or very easy from a manufacturing process potentially even being on the campus of these primes um is in our minds and then on the government side you look at these depot centers and sustainment and maintenance and can we be right adjacent to these bases.

So if you look at Oklahoma for example, Tinker Air Base, can we be adjacent to that air base, partner with their air force sustainment organization and supply parts um directly to the base from that factory at the same time that that factory could flex use some of its capacity to do work uh for the primes that are you know in that locality as well.

Um and that's also the beauty here is no one is burdened with the full cost because this is a platform and you can share the capacity. You're not asking the government to pay for 100% of it 100% of the time. You can actually scale and flex and have elasticity to the capital and the risk uh associated with that capital.

Jordy, uh any updates on Singer, the on the on the automotive side, specifically the supercar that you guys built? Yeah. No, it's uh it's been an amazing few weeks for us. We've got more cars on the road now. So, we did our 10th delivery. As you know, we started deliveries this year.

So, there's now multiple multiple cars on the road in LA. Multiple across the US. We actually have our first couple cars in the UK as well. So, we've made our way onto uh greater European uh turf with America's hypercar.

So, um very excited to keep building that business out, deliver more cars this year, and then look into actually developing variants of that hypercar. Uh won't announce those now. And then also our next vehicle, our next model alto together.

And that feedback loop, that integration with divergent uh remains very very uh attractive.

And frankly, when the government or a customer comes and they come to this campus and they see the divergent facility, then they walk right next door and they see the general assembly or the 21C, the hypercar, that shows them almost the relationship uh between us as a subcontractor and the prime as the prime integrator, right?

We're actually putting um our own dollars um in front of our statements there on how you can integrate for full product development. What's the what's the shape of the workforce going forward? Obviously, new capital comes in. You're probably hiring.

You're probably always hiring, but uh give me some advice for young people that want to get into um doing work that might still be around in 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. business and that we truly are software and hardware, right? We've built our own software design engine.

We've got our own manufacturing software, but we also build hardware. Uh we build our our 3D printers. We build our assembly cell. We actually engineer those materials. So, in terms of scope within one business and amount of vertical um depth in each of those pillars um is really tremendous here.

uh when you're starting out, we were mostly hiring or I was mostly looking for talent that could bring a lot to the table day one, both in terms of their connectivity, but also their knowledge and their ability to operate.

We're now at a point where we're actually able to hire on some of the brightest and youngest uh engineers and production staff, which is amazing position to be in somewhere where I've wanted to be for for a few years.

And what we look for in that sort of more entry level role is really how scalable is that person going to become? What are they already showing today that I can tell is going to make them a great learner and eventually a great operator?

And then we have the individuals here that can add to their expertise that they're bringing in. And within one, two, three years, I want to see that entrylevel engineer have progressed to a lead engineer or have found his management um track. and pick one of the