Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned.
Ares Industries, which launched last week, has pitched its “low-cost cruise missiles” as suited for use in a potential war between the US and China in the Taiwan Strait. The start-up claims that US weapons stockpiles would be exhausted within weeks in such a conflict, and that “recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that our weapons are too large, too expensive for the wars of today”.
Ares’ founders, Alex Tseng and Devan Plantamura, say their $300,000 anti-ship cruise missiles “will be 10x smaller and 10x cheaper” than today’s alternatives. On the YC website, Tseng’s biography consists of a single sentence: “Missiles are cool.”