Freeform Future Corp. has won an Other Transaction agreement from the Department of War's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to scale production of flight-qualified space hardware for spacecraft. The July 30 award falls under DIU's Adaptive Space Manufacturing and Integration at Scale project, known as 10n, which aims to produce components on demand rather than through the industry's traditional low-volume, custom-build process.
Freeform will apply its AI-native Skyfall platform to produce mission-critical propulsion and structural hardware, combining GPU-accelerated physics modeling, metal additive manufacturing and real-time process control. What's new here is the target production rate: DIU wants suppliers capable of hundreds of units a month, scaling to thousands a year, a volume space hardware manufacturing has rarely approached outside high-rate commercial satellite programs.
The 10n project responds to a supply chain historically built around bespoke parts and long lead times, now strained by expanding heavy-lift launch capacity and proliferated satellite constellations. Freeform will work through an iterative Design-Build-Test and Validate/Qualify process meant to advance the space industry's manufacturing readiness level, a scale used to judge how consistently a production process turns out qualified hardware.
"The country needs production that moves at operational speed, and that is what we deliver," said Erik Palitsch, founder and chief executive officer of Freeform Future Corp.
Freeform's backers include NVIDIA's NVentures, Founders Fund, Threshold Ventures and Apandion, and the company was named to Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies list for 2026. The DIU award marks its first publicly disclosed defense contract, a sign of the Pentagon's broader push to pull venture-backed, dual-use manufacturers directly into the space supply chain.
