Build a new kind of rocket engine, and the world will beat a path to your door. Or at least that’s how it’s worked out for Venus Aerospace and its Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE), an ultra-efficient way to hurl stuff into the sky.
The company was founded in 2020 by husband-and-wife duo, CEO Sassie Duggleby and CTO Andrew Duggleby, with the idea of developing clean-flying hypersonic jets for passenger travel. But after successfully demonstrating the engine last year, their plans changed.
“What happened when we flew last May is the world looked at us and said, ‘oh my gosh, you have a working RDRE, would you sell us one?’ And that wasn’t what we were expecting,” Sassie Duggleby told TechCrunch.
Now, the company is focused on hypersonic weapons development, replacing the solid rocket motors that power many missiles with its own thruster, and high-speed space vehicles that appeal to the military.
“Our propulsion architecture combines efficiency, throttling, reusability and manufacturability in a way that
customers need for real defense and space missions,” Andrew Duggleby said in a statement. “We are focused on translating technical progress into reliable systems for operational use.”
Venus announced a $90 million Series B round today that aims to put the company in a position to do just that by funding testing and development work on specific vehicle designs with potential customers. The funding round was led by Mercury Fund and saw participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, MESH, PEAK6, Draper
Associates, Starboard Star Venture Capital, and Green Sands Equity.
The RDRE was dreamed up in the mid-20th century as a theoretically more efficient way to launch rockets; instead of burning propellants in a round chamber, the engine creates a continual supersonic wave of combustion that rotates through a circular channel. (Here’s a visualization.) The idea promised to waste less propellant, but the complex physics proved tricky to understand and control.
That’s changed in recent years, with the advent of 3D printing and better simulations. The first working test took place in 2020 at the University of Central Florida. NASA demonstrated an RDRE on the ground for the first time in 2022, while Japan’s space agency JAXA fired one for a few seconds in space in 2021. Venus’ 2025 test was the first time an RDRE launched a rocket into flight.
“When we first started Venus, the entire story was there’s a new type of rocket engine, we think it’s going to put out more heat and more thrust and be more efficient, but we think we know how to keep it from melting,” Sassie Duggleby said. “That’s been a lot of what our work has been over the last four years—how do we keep this engine from melting—and we’ve solved that.”
This year, the company was awarded a grant from the Texas Space Commission to build a new, larger test stand. That will be key for Venus: The longest it has fired its engine during 600 tests is 32 seconds, but it will likely need to burn for at least 6 to 15 minutes to meet the goals of its customers.
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