REGENT Raises USD 240M, Largest Venture Round in Rhode Island History

REGENT Craft has closed a USD 240 million Series B, split roughly evenly between equity and debt, bringing the company's total funding commitments to USD 340 million. Mare Liberum and AE Ventures led the equity portion, with debt capital from Erebor Bank. DCVC joined as a new investor alongside returning backers Founders Fund, Caffeinated Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Japan Airlines, and Giant Step Capital. Local reporting has called it the largest venture raise in Rhode Island's history.

What REGENT Builds

REGENT designs and manufactures Seagliders, high-speed hydrofoiling wing-in-ground-effect craft that skim just above the water surface, capable of speeds up to 180 miles per hour. The company was founded by two MIT-trained engineers, CEO Billy Thalheimer and CTO Mike Klinker, both formerly of Boeing. REGENT already holds an expanded USD 15 million US Marine Corps contract for its Viceroy platform, positioning the company as a dual-use business serving both commercial maritime mobility and defense demand simultaneously.

Why This Round Matters

The round's equity-debt structure, and the presence of both Lockheed Martin Ventures and Japan Airlines on the cap table, reflects a hardware-and-defense-tech financing pattern distinct from typical software venture rounds: real manufacturing capital, blended with strategic capital from customers who will actually operate the product. For founders in deep tech, defense, and dual-use hardware, it is evidence that later-stage rounds in this category increasingly combine venture equity with structured debt rather than relying on equity alone to fund capital-intensive manufacturing scale-up.

Japan Airlines' continued participation is also worth noting on its own: an airline investing in a hydrofoiling maritime craft signals interest in Seagliders as a genuine transportation category, not just a defense platform, and points toward a commercial passenger and cargo use case running in parallel with the military contracts. That dual commercial-and-defense revenue base is precisely what tends to justify blended equity-debt structures at this scale, since lenders get more comfortable extending debt against a business with contracted government revenue underwriting part of the balance sheet.

What This Means for Founders

Dual-use positioning, building a product with both commercial and defense applications, continues to open a distinct pool of capital that pure-commercial or pure-defense startups cannot access individually. Founders building hardware or deep-tech companies should study how REGENT paired a defense contract with commercial maritime ambitions to attract both financial and strategic investors in the same round. Founders can browse the investor directory on AngelLinx for deep-tech and dual-use focused funds, use the investor match tool to find investors comfortable with blended equity-debt structures, and review the live listing for how other hardware-heavy raises are being structured. Managing burn ratediscipline is especially critical in capital-intensive manufacturing businesses. Founders ready to build their investor list can register on AngelLinx to get started.

AngelLinx Intelligence | angellinx.ai