MegaBots closed out its Kickstarter campaign with a whopping $554, 592, ensuring Team USA will come locked and loaded to its eagerly anticipated giant-robot battle with Japan.

On June 30, a day that will surely go down in history, U.S. company MegaBots threw down the gauntlet, challenging Japan to a mecha showdown, with nothing less than national pride at stake. Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry accepted, but immediately raised the stakes: This wouldn't just be any fight between enormous piloted robots; this would be full-on hand-to-hand combat.

That created a major problem for MegaBots, whose 12,000-pound, 15-foot MegaBot Mark II can fire 3-pound paintballs at 100 miles per hour, but isn't equipped to withstand that kind of beating. So last month the company turned to the public for help, and the public delivered.

With its $500,000 Kickstarter goal met, MegaBots can upgrade the Mark II's armor, firepower, hydraulics and power unit, and increase its top speed (the mecha is pretty slow, but the hope is to make it nearly twice as fast as Japan's Kuratas). From there the company will have to work with Suidobashi to design the battle, agree on the rules and weapons systems, and of course settle on a location.

“We have a pretty good lead,” MegaBots co-founder Matt Oehrlein tells Make, “but I can’t disclose that yet.”