Company · Venture Capital · Dual-Use
The Venture Fund Where the Partners Used to Run the Missions
New North Ventures backs founders building for both the Pentagon and the marketplace - a dual-use bet led by former intelligence operators and the entrepreneur who built Dyn.
On most venture teams, the phrase "field experience" means a stint at a startup that failed gracefully. At New North Ventures, it can mean 34 years across the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office and a US Navy special-operations career. That gap - between people who have read about the problem and people who have lived it - is the entire premise of the firm.
New North Ventures is an early-stage venture fund based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, investing at what it calls the nexus of national security and commercial technology. It was founded in 2021 by Brett Davis, a former CIA senior executive and Navy special-operations officer, and Jeremy Hitchcock, the entrepreneur who built the internet-infrastructure company Dyn before selling it to Oracle. The idea was to pair the operator's understanding of what the government actually needs with the builder's understanding of how companies actually scale.
The thesisDual-use, all the way down
The word that does the heavy lifting at New North is "dual-use." The firm looks for technology that is genuinely valuable in an open commercial market and also solves a national-security problem - not a defense project retrofitted for civilians, and not a consumer app with a government pilot bolted on. The two use cases are supposed to reinforce each other. A radio-frequency mapping satellite sells to shipping insurers and to intelligence agencies. A deepfake detector protects banks and protects elections. The commercial market provides the revenue discipline; the mission provides the durability.
That framing has aged well. When New North started, funding companies that sold to the Pentagon was still treated as a contrarian move by much of Silicon Valley. It no longer is. As the firm's principal Jessica Nelson put it, defense tech has become a crowded trade - which changes the job of an early investor from spotting the category to surviving the rush into it.
The moneyA fund with a government match
In July 2025 New North announced the first close of its second fund: $45M in committed capital, against a target of $80M and room to grow toward $100M. What makes Fund II unusual is the structure. New North was one of just 18 funds named to the first cohort of the SBIC Critical Technologies Initiative (SBICCT), a joint program of the Department of Defense and the Small Business Administration designed to pull private capital into technologies the government considers strategically important.
The mechanics matter to founders and limited partners alike. The program offers roughly 125% fund matching - government leverage layered on top of private commitments - which stretches every dollar an LP puts in. Fund II concentrates on three of the DoD's 14 Critical Technology Areas: cybersecurity, space, and trusted AI and autonomy. New North plans to write slightly larger checks than it did in Fund I, where the average was around $1M, and to hold back capital for follow-on rounds so it can keep backing winners as they grow.
Where the capital goes // Fund II focus
Fund II narrows from Fund I's broad dual-use mandate to three of the DoD's 14 Critical Technology Areas.
The portfolioSatellites, sea drones and small reactors
The best way to understand New North's taste is to read its portfolio, which is unusually physical for a fund that talks so much about software. There is HawkEye 360 (NYSE: HAWK), a radio-frequency satellite-monitoring company and one of the firm's early bets, now public. There is HavocAI, which builds modular small uncrewed surface vessels - sea drones - for defense and commercial customers. Auriga Space is developing electrically powered launch vehicles for on-demand access to space and hypersonic testing. StarCube is working on factory-manufacturable nuclear-fission micro-reactors.
The software side is just as pointed. Reality Defender hunts deepfakes across audio, images and video. Prelude Security runs continuous security assessments against enterprise systems. Cybera tries to prevent fraud and recover funds for victims of cybercrime. Beacon AI builds an AI copilot for aviation. And, in a nod to the industry it operates in, Pitchfire is building an AI associate that ingests, researches and scores inbound pitch decks - a venture fund funding the automation of venture funds.
In 2025 the firm led the pre-seed round for M2 Foundry, a startup building software and AI-enabled systems for national security and other high-risk infrastructure markets, co-investing alongside an angel syndicate. It is the kind of deal that fits the pattern: founders who worked inside the government, building for a market that reaches well beyond it.
The edgeFounders who lived the problem
New North's stated preference is for founders who have personally lived the problems they are trying to solve, and the firm holds itself to the same bar. Alongside Hitchcock, the team includes partner Bryan Mabry, principal Jessica Nelson, and a network of operators and entrepreneurs - among them a former CIA officer, serial investors, and advisors drawn from the intelligence and national-security world. The firm describes itself as a "fusion center for action," and runs convenings such as dual-use conferences to keep government and industry talking to each other.
Revenue discipline and a customer base that isn't dependent on a single procurement cycle.
A national-security use case that gives the technology durability and strategic pull.
Partners who have run the missions and can tell a real requirement from a slide.
There is a shadow over the origin story. Brett Davis, the co-founder whose intelligence career gave the firm its point of view, died in 2023. His imprint on the thesis - that national security and economic resilience are the same story told from two ends - remains the organizing idea of the firm he helped start.
The marketWhere New North fits
New North sits in a fast-filling corner of venture capital. Larger, better-known names have moved into defense and dual-use investing, from Founders Fund's American Dynamism practice to Lux Capital, Shield Capital and Razor's Edge. What distinguishes a small Portsmouth fund in that company is not check size - it is stage and specialization. New North gets in early, at pre-seed and seed, in technologies most generalist funds only reach once the risk has been priced out. The SBICCT structure gives it leverage to punch above its raw fund size, and the sector focus gives it a reason for founders to pick its money over cheaper capital.
The firm's ambition, in its own words, is to back companies that become the next Cisco, SpaceX or Moderna - category-defining businesses that happen to sit on the seam between commerce and security. Whether any single portfolio company gets there is unknowable. What is clear is the bet New North is making: that the technologies keeping a country safe and the technologies building its economy are increasingly the same technologies, and that the people best placed to spot them are the ones who used to depend on them.