At 18 years, the arithmetic of an Army career is almost indecently simple. Two more years can complete the familiar bargain: serve for twenty, then retire with the pension earned along the way. Andy Yakulis understood the equation. He also believed a different clock was running faster. In 2024, the West Point graduate and special operations commander left active duty and helped start Vector, a defense company built around an urgent complaint. New technology was changing warfare in months while American procurement still often moved in years.
Yakulis has recalled an old military saying that bothered him: “We give our soldiers yesterday’s technology tomorrow.” It is a fine line if one enjoys bleak comedy. He did not. His answer was to leave the institution he had served since graduating from West Point in 2006 and attempt the repair from outside. He described it as walking away from “the most secure pension in the world” because he could no longer stand on the sidelines.
The move was less a conversion than a change of instruments. Yakulis had spent his career where operations, aviation, technology and capital meet. He led tactical combat operations, served as a pilot-in-command and air mission commander, worked on corporate ventures at the Army Applications Laboratory, and held investment and strategic engagement roles at the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. Vector gave those separate experiences one address.
Lacrosse, helicopters and the long route to the factory floor
Before the Pentagon offices and investor meetings, there was West Point lacrosse. Yakulis played Division I as a four-year varsity letterman while earning a bachelor’s degree in geospatial information science. The sport is an illuminating footnote: a field of constant movement, quick substitutions and decisions made while being hit. In 2006 he commissioned into an Army heading deeper into long wars. He later wrote that, as a cadet, he had wondered whether he might miss the war. President George W. Bush’s graduation address made clear that his class would not.
Deployments followed. So did aviation. Yakulis earned the FAA’s Helicopter Airline Transport Pilot certification, the highest commercial rating in that category, and a parachuting license. He completed a master’s degree in defense and strategic studies at the Naval War College. Later, as a Sloan Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he studied management with an emphasis on technology innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital.
The résumé could be read as three careers arguing with each other: soldier, pilot, founder. Yakulis reads it as one problem viewed from three altitudes. Operators know what fails in practice. Pilots are trained to respect systems and consequences. Founders discover whether an institution will pay for the repair. At Stanford he also entered the health-technology world, co-founding Medeloop.ai and serving as its chief operating officer before Vector.
A drone is hardware. A capability has a memory.
Vector makes and integrates small unmanned systems, including attritable aircraft designed to be affordable enough to use in numbers. Yet the company’s more revealing product is the loop around the machine. Yakulis calls the model “modern warfare as a service.” The phrase has the tidy sound of software sales. The work inside it is untidy by design: tactical training, technical instruction, hardware, sustainment, field observation and product development are bundled together.
In Yakulis’s account, a customer does not simply learn to fly a first-person-view drone. The operator learns how it fits into a mission and what other equipment or tactics it requires. When a system is consumed or conditions change, the replacement can incorporate a newer component or a lesson from the field. The company has maintained personnel rotations in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan to observe how unmanned systems are actually employed. Its engineers then carry those observations into revisions.
The idea carries a sharp critique of conventional acquisition. A requirement written early can preserve yesterday’s assumptions long after the battlefield has edited them. Service contracts, including contracts funded through operations and maintenance budgets, can create a route to deliver and update capability within the year of execution. That route is central to Vector’s pitch.
“We realized there was a gap in the market of anyone providing this fully integrated model.”Andy Yakulis, describing Vector’s combination of training, tactics and equipment
There is a useful lesson here beyond defense. Products that operate in volatile environments require a living relationship with the people using them. The moment of sale is not the finish line. It is an observation post. Vector’s bet is that a factory can become part of the learning system rather than the distant end of a purchase order.
A headquarters is a theory about how people work
Yakulis began Vector in Virginia after serving at the Pentagon. He soon found himself comparing ecosystems. Northern Virginia offered proximity to government but, in his view, lacked the entrepreneurial current he wanted. Silicon Valley had startup voltage, yet he saw employees rotating from one company to the next and less founder-to-founder collaboration than he found in Utah.
Vector moved its headquarters to the Salt Lake City area in 2025. The decision was pleasantly literal for a drone company. Utah offered open skies for testing, proximity to military installations, a growing aerospace network and an outdoor culture attractive to veterans. Yakulis noted that people who came to Utah tended to stay. Half of Vector’s team was prior military by late 2025, and the company joined 47G, the state’s aerospace and defense association.
The geography supports the culture Vector advertises: relentless, ethical and professional. Yakulis’s recruiting style supplies a more human example. He once described meeting a candidate who already had a good job and was merely open to a compelling alternative. So he flipped the interview and let the candidate question him. He explained the mission, the problems and the influence the candidate could have, with an emphasis on candor over polish. Founders enjoy saying they hire adults. Letting the adult examine the founder is the part that proves it.
Graduates from West Point, commissions in the Army and begins an 18-year military career.
Studies technology innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital as a Stanford Sloan Fellow.
Works at Army Applications Laboratory and the Office of Strategic Capital.
Leaves active duty and co-founds Vector.
Moves Vector to Utah, closes a $61 million Series A and secures a $20 million manufacturing loan.
The less glamorous half of drone dominance
Modern defense startups photograph well at the prototype stage. Production is where the romance meets the parts bin. Vector raised a $61 million Series A in September 2025 from a group including Pelion Venture Partners, Harpoon Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Shield Capital. In March 2026, it secured a $20 million loan from J.P. Morgan to expand its Utah facilities, reinforce domestic supply chains and buy inventory.
Yakulis framed the debt as a manufacturing instrument. American drone policy increasingly calls for low-cost systems produced at scale without critical Chinese components. Answering that call requires more than a clever airframe. Suppliers must be qualified. Assembly must be consistent. Batteries must remain viable. Components must be refreshed. A stockpile has to avoid becoming a museum.
Vector has proposed that the government buy capacity while the company retains custody of inventory, maintains it and updates internal components before delivery in tranches. It is the service model applied to a warehouse: readiness becomes something continuously tended rather than purchased once and admired from afar.
The ambition is visible in Yakulis’s published work, too. With retired General David Petraeus, he argued in 2024 that lessons from Ukraine demanded changes not only in weapons but in doctrine, training, procurement and manufacturing. In a later essay, he described warfare as an equation increasingly shaped by the cost and quantity of systems. His point is not that sophistication has vanished. It is that exquisite capability alone cannot create mass.
“The warriors I served alongside deserved the best capabilities possible. Yesterday, not today.”Andy Yakulis, on the delay he founded Vector to confront
The uniform changed. The customer stayed.
On the nineteenth anniversary of his West Point graduation, Yakulis considered the retirement paperwork he might otherwise have been preparing. Instead, he was scaling Vector. He wrote that he had never felt more like he was serving. It is a founder’s statement, naturally interested in its own wager, but it clarifies the personal continuity beneath the career break.
Vector is staffed by veterans, engineers, drone builders and investors. Co-founders include technologist George Matus, former Navy SEAL Matt Long and veteran investor Larsen Jensen. The connections matter because Yakulis’s thesis resists the lone-inventor myth. A drone separated from tactics is incomplete. An operator separated from engineering is a lost feedback channel. A factory separated from capital is a tour.
His own path follows the same combinatorial logic. West Point supplied the commitment. Special operations supplied the stakes. Aviation supplied respect for systems. Stanford supplied the vocabulary of company building. Pentagon investment roles supplied a view of the machinery between invention and adoption. Vector is where he is trying to make those parts move together.
Whether the model can keep its promised pace as production and contracts grow will be the consequential test. Speed is easier at nine employees than at nearly one hundred. Feedback is cleanest before it passes through departments. A company founded to escape slow systems must take care not to manufacture one of its own.
Yakulis’s answer so far is repetition: observe, integrate, train, build, return. The verbs are ordinary. Their order is the strategy. Two years from an Army pension, he chose to restart the clock. Now his company is trying to make sure the equipment on tomorrow’s battlefield does not arrive with yesterday still packed inside.