said Monday it has made $5 billion in startup investments in the first year of its U.S. security and resiliency initiative, halfway to its initial $10 billion goal. The bank said last year it would deploy $10 billion into startups over a decade.
The bank may go beyond that initial amount, JPMorgan co-President told CNBC in an interview. He said , who leads the group that makes the startup investments, has "hit the ground running" and put the bank into "some really interesting companies."
Most of those investments have not been disclosed. Two known stakes are Hadrian, which builds automated factories that make parts for the defense, aerospace and maritime sectors, and Castelion, which is developing low-cost .
In August, the bank helped lead a $1.4 billion funding round for Hadrian, and it was involved in a $1 billion funding round for Castelion, whose flagship product is a hypersonic missile called Blackbeard. Castelion was founded in late 2022 by a group of former SpaceX engineers.
"Our approach is to find generational companies and partner with them for the long term," Combs said in a statement Monday. "Putting more than $5 billion to work in our first year shows how many exceptional businesses are building in industries that strengthen critical supply chains," he said.
Separately, the bank said it has financed and facilitated more than $230 billion in transactions in the initiative's first year, part of a broader goal of supporting $1.5 trillion in activity over a decade. That part of the project is led by , a former co-head of investment banking at JPMorgan.
The initiative was created a year ago by JPMorgan CEO , amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and trade disputes with China that have threatened the flow of energy and key components needed for U.S. industries and defense. Its scope extends beyond supply chain, defense and manufacturing to frontier technologies and the pharmaceutical and health-tech industries, and it has been expanded to Europe and Canada.
JPMorgan built a team of about three dozen bankers for the project, aided by hundreds more across the firm. Petno said the bank's bankers are mapping distribution lines for products from submarines and missiles to aircraft to find suppliers that may lack the capital or capacity to meet rising demand, and that JPMorgan is in regular communication with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce about the government's needs.