The decisive moment in a modern military exercise may look almost boring. A charging bank clicks off. A laptop goes dark. A radar feed freezes. There can be fuel stacked nearby and a generator still running, yet the useful electricity is unavailable at the instant a cluster of drones, computers and sensors demands it. The machine has energy. The mission has a power problem.
Adam Warmoth has built a career around machines that make severe demands on batteries, power electronics and software. He worked on electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft at Kitty Hawk and Uber Elevate. At Anduril, he helped lead work around counter-intrusion and counter-drone systems. At Archer Aviation, he returned to electric flight as a senior director of product. The technologies changed. The electrical constraint kept introducing itself.
In late 2024, Warmoth founded Chariot Defense in South San Francisco to take that constraint seriously. The company builds transportable systems that receive energy from available sources, store it, condition it and send it where a unit needs power. Its first family is called Amphora, after the ancient vessel designed to carry something valuable. Here the cargo is electrons, and the route can lead to a command post, a radar, a drone charger or a laser.
“Power is this underappreciated problem that’s now becoming apparent.”Adam Warmoth, on Chariot’s reason for existing
The dependency under the demo
Defense technology is easy to picture as a parade of visible objects: autonomous aircraft, jammers, sensors, robots and directed-energy weapons. Electricity is the quieter layer underneath. Those systems do not draw power smoothly. A radar wakes. A bank of drone batteries begins fast-charging. A laser asks for a sustained burst. Edge computers ingest several feeds at once. If demand lands together, the architecture must react before a breaker does.
A diesel generator works best at a steady load. Size one for the highest imaginable demand and it becomes heavy, noisy, hot and thirsty. Size it for the average and a surge can overwhelm it. Batteries handle bursts quickly but have finite capacity. Chariot’s proposition is to make the two complementary, then use software and solid-state power electronics to coordinate the flow.
The smaller Amphora 24 operates at 24 volts DC, with 5 kilowatts of power and 5 kilowatt-hours of capacity. Amphora 400 moves into three-phase, high-voltage territory for more demanding systems. The specifications matter, but Warmoth’s more revealing phrase is “power lake”: different sources flow in, different users draw out. The point is flexibility when the tidy assumptions of a laboratory meet extension cords, old equipment, bad weather and tired operators.
A product manager in the mud
Warmoth’s operating method begins with proximity. He has argued that no amount of office research can reproduce what happens when unfamiliar equipment is plugged into legacy systems during an exercise. The only honest path is to get the device into users’ hands, observe the failure modes and return with another version.
That conviction carries an echo from sports. At Stanford, Warmoth studied engineering physics while playing the physical 2-meter defender position in varsity water polo. He earned repeated all-academic honors and captained the team during his senior year. Water polo is an odd preparation for industrial hardware only until you consider the environment: constant resistance, limited visibility, fast transitions and much of the useful work happening below the surface.
His Stanford projects reveal the same appetite for physical systems. He built a modular balsa-wood unmanned aircraft to study low-speed flight and designed a pendulum wave machine whose carefully tuned lengths had to fall back into alignment after roughly 60 cycles. In 2018, a year after completing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a mechatronics focus, he gave a TEDx talk about electric urban air mobility. Aircraft looked like the destination then. In retrospect, they were also an education in high-voltage systems and the unforgiving gap between a schematic and a vehicle.
Warmoth says Chariot succeeds when a soldier, given a real choice among scarce things to carry, voluntarily takes the power system because it improves the mission. Usefulness has to survive weight, heat, exhaustion and competing priorities.
At Anduril, the gap became operational. Warmoth has said the team repeatedly encountered power as a limiting factor while fielding advanced sensors and countermeasures. A new piece of software could arrive quickly, yet the supporting power architecture remained rooted in low-voltage batteries and large generators. When he left after about three and a half years, he wrote proudly of the counter-intrusion and counter-UAS businesses his teams had built. He then joined Archer to work on deploying electric aircraft. Soon, the repeated pattern outweighed the individual products.
Half a pickup bed
One Chariot field demonstration turns the thesis into a scene. At a Naval Postgraduate School experimentation event, Aurelius Systems was testing a laser weapon against small drones. Three large fossil-fuel generators supplied the setup. Chariot arrived with a high-voltage battery system occupying half the bed of a pickup truck.
The generators were disconnected. Chariot’s quieter, lower-signature system powered successful laser shots and, according to the Navy account, retained enough energy for more than 1,000 additional blasts. The arithmetic was useful. The contrast was better: three conspicuous machines replaced, a power source small enough to arrive in a pickup, and an advanced weapon able to do its actual job.
Warmoth’s language around signature is as important as his language around capacity. A running generator produces noise and heat. In a contested environment, both can disclose a position. Storing energy allows a unit to run quietly during sensitive windows, then replenish when conditions permit. Power management becomes part of survivability rather than a matter for the maintenance ledger.
“We’re really trying to raise the primacy of the kilowatt-hour.”Warmoth on how mission planning has to change
A company built outside
Chariot came out of stealth in July 2025 with an $8 million seed round led by General Catalyst and XYZ Venture Capital. By then the company said it had participated in large Defense Department exercises, supported the Army’s Transformation in Contact work and the Defense Innovation Unit’s Artemis drone project. Publicity followed fieldwork.
Seven months later, Chariot announced a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors returning and several defense-focused firms joining. The capital was assigned to prosaic, difficult work: expanding production of Amphora 24 and Amphora 400, developing the software layer for control and distribution, and hiring engineers able to move between high-voltage power, firmware, thermal design and manufacturing.
The lead investor offered a useful detail about the founder. Warmoth was hard to pin down for an early call because he was so often traveling to demonstrations and exercises. The joke was that his title should be chief forward-deployed engineer. It also described the company’s feedback loop. In July 2026, Warmoth posted from Fort Irwin, where temperatures exceeded 105 degrees, as Chariot systems worked with Army, joint and allied users during Project Convergence. The office had moved to the desert again.
Stanford engineering physics, mechanical engineering and varsity water polo.
TEDx talk on electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft and urban mobility.
Electric flight and defense-product work across Kitty Hawk, Uber Elevate, Anduril and Archer.
Chariot Defense founded around expeditionary power and energy management.
From stealth and an $8 million seed to a $34 million Series A and scaled deployments.
The useful layer
There is a temptation in technology to admire the object with the most visible intelligence. Warmoth’s career keeps pointing toward the supporting system that decides whether the intelligence can remain switched on. A drone sortie rate depends on recharge speed. A command post depends on steady compute. A laser weapon turns electricity into an effect, but only after someone solves generation, storage, conversion, cooling and distribution.
Chariot’s ambition is to make those pieces behave as infrastructure: modular, legible and responsive across a mobile network. The company is not arguing that diesel disappears. Its architecture expects combustion, vehicle alternators, renewable sources and grid connections to coexist. The shift is in what happens after energy is created. Software can decide where it goes. Batteries can absorb peaks. Vehicles can become sources. A unit can act more like a moving microgrid than a collection of extension cords.
For founders, Warmoth’s most portable lesson is not about defense. It is about following the recurring constraint through several glamorous industries until it becomes a company. Electric aviation showed him what commercial supply chains could deliver. Counter-drone work showed him the consequence of inadequate field power. Exercises supplied requirements that interviews could not. Chariot formed where those observations overlapped.
Warmoth once summarized the new martial logic in five words: “Electrons are the new bullets.” The line is sharp, but his work lives in the less quotable details - connectors, conversion losses, charging curves, dust, noise, heat and the judgment of a soldier deciding what deserves space on a vehicle. The modern battlefield may be filling with autonomy. Chariot’s wager is that command of power determines how much of it stays alive.