Ares Industries - Building low-cost cruise missiles 🚀

Hello, we’re Alex and Devan, and we’re building the low-cost cruise missiles the United States needs!

What we’re building

Ares is building a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles. We are going to deliver the capabilities that the DoD wants in a form factor that’s 10x smaller and 10x cheaper.

Our missiles will be compatible with existing launch platforms, deliver smaller payloads at high subsonic speeds, and take out ships hundreds of miles away. We’re focusing on ground and ship-launched variants to start but will expand into air-launched versions, as well as versions with extended ranges and different payloads.

Why we’re doing this

A war with China in the Taiwan Strait would look nothing like what we've seen in Ukraine or the Middle East. Wargames within DoD and military experts are in agreement that the most useful weapons in such a conflict would be long range anti-ship weapons or cruise missiles.

The United States is not adequately prepared. In a potential conflict, our stockpiles will run out in weeks, and we currently don’t have the industrial capacity to build at a rate that could win a war, much less deter China. Higher-ups in DoD are waking up to the problem, and generals such as Major General Cameron Holt and officials such as Chairman of the House Select Committee on China Mike Gallagher have echoed this sentiment.

Recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that our weapons are too large, too expensive for the wars of today. Existing anti-ship cruise missiles are low-volume, multi-million dollar, 3,000 lb behemoths meant to take out large cruisers and destroyers.

But Chinese shipbuilding capability is far superior to ours, and we can’t make enough anti-ship missiles to counter. In addition, huge missiles aren’t needed to take out the smaller corvettes and frigates that make up the People’s Liberation Army Navy. And $3M missiles make even less sense to take out swarms of $200k small, unmanned surface vessels.

The DoD needs smaller, less expensive cruise missiles, and lots of them! But no one has delivered on that promise yet.

How we know how to do this

Both of us have worked at multiple defense and munitions startups. Devan is an Army Psychological Operations and Navy combat veteran and has deep experience in operations and business development at well-funded defense startups. Alex was the first engineering hire at an earlier missile startup, built autonomous systems at Rivian and Stanford, and worked on turbojets at CSULB.

Where we’re at now

We spent the summer building multiple prototypes and flight-testing them in the Mojave. In 11 weeks, we went from starting the company to flight testing with our own design. We are on track to deliver early working missile systems to our first customers by mid-2025.

We believe our vision for anti-ship cruise missiles can help fill the munitions gap that the US faces. At Ares, we would never wish for a war to occur. But by helping to rebuild our defense industrial base, we can make sure the United States is prepared to stop a conflict and save countless lives.

Our Ask

We are looking for extremely talented aerospace engineers to help bring our prototypes to fruition. If you know any aerodynamics, propulsion, or GNC engineers who are interested in building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics, please send them our way!