A fast-growing Austin-based defense technology company plans to move its headquarters to Cedar Park, where it plans to expand operations and reach 135 employees by 2030.

Aeon Industrial Inc. on May 26 was approved by the Economic Development Corporation (Type A) Board for a maximum of $2.1 million in performance-based incentives to move into a 48,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing facility at 2305 Scottsdale Drive. It is headed to City Council for final approval on May 28.

The company would be the first tenant in the 280,000-square-foot Cedar Tech I development being built by Dallas-based Holt Lunsford Commercial. The project is aiming to deliver by the end of this year. It comes as Cedar Park, which is 20 miles northwest of Austin, aims to market itself as an aerospace and defense hub.

Aeon founder and CEO Naweed Tahmas told the Austin Business Journal they looked at several suburbs around Austin but picked Cedar Park because of its "energy." He said they got the sense the city was more forward-leaning, accessible, easy to work with and was more excited and hungry to work with them.

"It has an innovative spirit – you have Firefly (Aerospace Inc.), you have other companies there, you have startups there. The city has really leaned into it, is really focused on making it easy for companies to move there, making it easy for companies to build there, especially frontier technology companies and defense companies like ours," he said.

Aeon is a manufacturer of defense systems that is aiming to build critical military hardware at scale and more effectively in a cheaper and faster way. It was founded in 2023, and its technology includes autonomous targeting. It is a vertically integrated company, meaning they build both weapons systems and components that go into the systems that they sell to other companies to use in other systems like drones.

Aeon and X-Bow Systems Inc., an Albuquerque-based maker of advanced manufacturing solid rocket motors with a massive campus in Luling, in December announced a partnership for missile production. The two parties plan to “engage in discussions to explore working together to test, commercialize and produce the solid rocket motors portion of Aeon's Zeus missile system,” according to the announcement.

The company has reportedly raised at least $18.6 million from venture firms, including Quiet Capital, Silent Ventures, 1789 Capital, SC Master Fund and What If Ventures, as well as Vanderbilt University.

Tahmas said the company's revenue is currently in the eight-digits without specifying an exact amount. He said their customers are both public and private, without naming any. Aeon reportedly has contracts for Zeus with the Defense Department, including with the Army Futures Command, which is headquartered in Austin.

All that means the company's biggest constraint is space, he said. It is currently split between two leases near The Domain totaling 15,000 square feet and has offices in Oklahoma and Alabama. He said the business is getting more and more orders and is running out of capacity.

"We don't have the physical bandwidth to be able to produce in the scale and numbers that our customers need," said Tahmas, who was on this year's Forbes 30 under 30 list.

 

 

Dave Creaney

Aeon has 40 employees and Tahmas said it is basically having three people work per office. The company has to create temporary office units just to fit in everybody. He said the plan is to move as quick as possible as the new facility is already designed. The company can wheel in furniture the first day after construction is finished.

"I'd like to have everything under one roof that enables us to be able to move much faster, have no communication gaps," Tahmas said. "That's why we're so excited to move to Cedar Park as fast as possible, so that we could have enough space for the team, for the development, for production, and then to also expand. We're still hiring for so many roles, and our biggest challenge is we don't have the space to give these people offices or desks to work out of."

Tahmas said the new facility will also have an innovation hub to expand the product portfolio. Aeon is still deciding whether to keep the other Austin facilities to use for something like production overflow.

"Our mission is to really keep America's edge and to provide war fighters with the absolute best technology possible to ensure that they come back home to their families," Tahmas said.

The performance-based incentives – codenamed "Project Zeus" – require Aeon to lease the facility by Dec. 31, 2027 and occupy it through the duration of the five-year agreement, according to city documents.

Aeon will receive $500,000 if it creates 75 jobs with an average salary of $115,000 by Dec. 31, 2027, invests $5.5 million in the site and generates annual sales tax revenue of at least $200,000, according to the documents.

It will receive another $500,000 for creating another 60 jobs with a combined total average salary of $118,450, investing another $500,000 in the site, and having at least an additional $204,000 of annual sales tax revenue by Dec. 31, 2028, according to the documents.

Aeon is required to maintain the 135 jobs with an average salary of $122,004, invest another $500,000 in capital investment, and generate at least $208,080 in additional annual sales tax revenue prior to Dec. 31, 2029 to receive the final $500,000, according to the documents.

The company is required to hit additional benchmarks through the remainder of the agreement. Those include maintaining 135 employees with an average salary of $133,317 by Dec. 31, 2032, making at least $8.5 million total in investment at the site by Dec. 31, 2031, and having annual sales taxes eclipsing $1 million by 2032.

Aeon employees are also eligible for an employee relocation bonus of $10,000 for each residence or residential lot purchased in Cedar Park by an Aeon employee, for a maximum of $500,000. They will also be able to receive a Cedar Park Chamber of Commerce membership valued at $5,000, according to the documents.

City officials said the project has a rate of return of 17.9%, meaning they will recoup the incentives through various taxes at a payback period of 5.7 years.

Austin-based Live Oak's Ryan Whalen, Doug Thomas and Ben Williamson represent Cedar Tech in the lease deal with Aeon. Austin-based Aquila Commercial LLC's Omar Nasser is representing Aeon.

Cedar Park, which has a population of 79,000 people, continues to attract companies in high-tech industries.

The most notable is Firefly Aerospace Inc., but other recent ones include Creative 3D Technologies Inc., which is aiming to build semiconductor chips with its "factory-in-a-box" single-cell additive system, and Sigmatic, an AI-native healthcare technology company. The city has increased its accelerator partnership to target semiconductor, aerospace and defense companies.

The move comes as the Central Texas Spaceport Corp. is in the process of finalizing a locale in Cedar Park for what could ultimately be a four-building, 115,000-square-foot research-and-development campus. It will be aimed at helping companies in the industry relocate, grow and operate in the region with more testing capacity. It comes with an estimated price tag between $78 million and $108 million.

Representatives from the spaceport initiative – which was launched last year with the backing of Williamson County and Cedar Park – said they are assessing locations for what they are calling Central Texas Spaceport and Defense Innovation Campus. It would be a partnership between the CTSDC, University of Texas' Cockrell School of Engineering and private entities in the commercial aerospace and defense industries.