The Firm That Builds Companies From a CIA Playbook
Most venture firms wait for founders to walk in the door. Red Cell Partners writes the idea first, then goes hunting for the people to build it - a studio model borrowed straight from the intelligence community.
In the American venture business, the ritual is well worn. A founder builds a deck, walks into a partner's office, and asks for money. Red Cell Partners runs the ritual backwards. The firm, based in McLean, Virginia, decides which company it wants to exist, writes the first check, assembles the team, and only then goes looking for the person to run it. The idea comes first. The founder comes last.
That inversion is not a gimmick. It is the whole thesis of a firm that has, since 2020, created roughly 15 companies and helped raise close to $600 million across itself and its incubations. The names it has produced - Epirus in directed-energy defense, Andesite in cyber, Zephyr AI in drug discovery - do not obviously belong to the same parent. What links them is a method, and the method has a source: the Central Intelligence Agency.
01 / The NameA red team, incorporated
After September 11, 2001, the CIA stood up a small unit called the Red Cell. Its job was not to predict the future but to argue with the present - a handful of the agency's sharper analysts tasked with challenging conventional wisdom, thinking like the adversary, and floating scenarios that the rest of the building had ruled out. The practice spread across the intelligence community and was later embedded in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 as a recognized best practice.
Red Cell Partners took the name and the posture. The firm frames its work as a standing exercise in contrarian analysis: look at a broken market, question the assumptions everyone else accepts, and build the company that the incumbents cannot or will not. It is a red team that ships product instead of memos.
"Our health care and defense systems are overburdened, underprepared, and in desperate need of once-in-a-generation reinvigoration." - Grant Verstandig
02 / The FounderFrom Rally Health to a company factory
The firm was co-founded by Grant Verstandig, Josh Lobel, and John Tenet. Verstandig, who serves as chairman and chief executive, is the reason the model has credibility. In 2010 he founded Rally Health, a consumer digital-health company he scaled past $1 billion in revenue before it was acquired by UnitedHealth Group in 2017 - one of the larger exits the sector has seen. He then spent four years as UnitedHealth's chief digital officer.
The lesson he carried out, by his own account, was that the hardest problems in healthcare are not clinical but structural - questions of incentives, plumbing, and who pays whom. That is a builder's frustration, not an investor's, and it shows up in how Red Cell operates. Verstandig is also a co-founder of Epirus, the defense company developing high-power microwave systems, and a former senior advisor to the National Security Agency. His co-founders bring investment-management and defense-venture backgrounds to the table.
03 / The MethodHow a company gets built here
Red Cell describes itself as a hybrid of incubator and investor. Rather than screening inbound pitches, it originates concepts in-house, tests them against real customer demand, and then commits Day-One capital along with shared operating muscle - engineering, product, talent, legal, and go-to-market teams that live at the firm and plug into each new company. The stated cadence from initial funding to a company's first outside raise averages about 16 months.
The Red Cell assembly line: concept and capital exist before the founder is recruited.
A recurring feature of the resulting teams is where the operators come from. Founders inside the portfolio have included former CIA and NSA personnel - Andesite is led by a former CIA officer, and the cyber company Eyris was co-founded by a former chief of innovation at the NSA. That talent pipeline is not incidental. It is what lets a firm credibly build for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
04 / The BetDual-use, on purpose
The strategic wrinkle that ties the portfolio together is dual-use. Red Cell favors products that can sell to both government and private-sector buyers, so a single company de-risks itself across two very different markets rather than betting everything on a slow federal procurement cycle. Eyris, launched in 2024, offers blockchain and quantum-resistant data protection pitched at the DoD, the intelligence community, and private enterprises at once. It is a hedge built into the product itself.
Healthcare
Zephyr AI, Crux, TARA Mind, Savoy Life and others attacking structural gaps in care and cost.
Cyber
Andesite's AI security operations center and Eyris's data-protection stack for federal and private users.
National Security
Epirus, DEFCON AI, Claros and others building resilience and defense systems.
"Industry-defining companies are built in years, not decades." - Josh Lobel, co-founder
05 / The PortfolioWhere the money has gone
The spread of outcomes is wide because the sectors are. On the defense side, Epirus develops high-power microwave systems designed to disable electronics at range. On cyber, Andesite - co-developed with General Catalyst and launched publicly in 2024 - builds what the company calls an AI security operations center, with a stated philosophy of keeping human analysts "at the helm." Andesite raised a $23 million round in early 2025, bringing its total to roughly $38 million. In healthcare, Zephyr AI applies machine learning to drug discovery, and Crux emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6.5 million.
Firm total spans capital raised across Red Cell and its incubations. Company figures are individually reported rounds.
Beyond incubations, Red Cell makes direct investments - the augmented-reality defense company Red 6 and the drug-discovery firm Envisagenics among them. The advisory bench reads like a Rolodex from the far side of the Potomac: former CIA Director George Tenet, former Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang have all been listed as advisors.
06 / The PositionStudio versus fund
Red Cell competes for the same deal flow and talent as defense-and-deep-tech investors like Founders Fund, 8VC, Shield Capital, and General Catalyst's American Dynamism practice, as well as other venture studios. Its edge, and its risk, is the same thing: it builds rather than backs. A pitch-driven fund can spread bets across hundreds of founders; a studio has to be right about which company to start before anyone writes code. When it works, the firm owns more of a company it understands deeply. When it doesn't, it has spent its own operators' time on the wrong idea.
For a customer - a health system, a federal agency, an enterprise security team - the pitch is straightforward. Red Cell's companies are built around a specific structural problem, staffed by people who have worked inside the institutions they sell to, and designed from the start to survive in more than one market. Whether that produces durable businesses is a question only time and the balance sheets will answer. For now, the assembly line keeps running.
