ai-for-defense
(3)
Usul
Usul is an AI platform that helps companies win government and defense contracts. Founded in 2024 and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, it monitors trillions in annual government spending, scrapes DoD contracts, budgets, and Program Executive Offices, then matches companies to relevant opportunities and connects them with the right decision-makers. Often described as 'PitchBook for Government,' Usul aims to make an opaque, insider-driven procurement world navigable for any technology company.
Jarren Reid
Jarren Reid is the 21-year-old CEO and co-founder of Usul, a Y Combinator (S24) startup building an AI platform that helps companies find, pursue, and win government contracts. Usul monitors roughly $8 trillion in annual government spending across 60+ nations, matching companies to opportunities in defense, IT, energy, and healthcare. Reid worked for defense contractors including Palantir and MITRE while still young, dropped out of Stanford to build Usul after seeing how broken the acquisition process was, and has become one of the youngest CEOs working with the U.S. government today.
Michael Hunter
Michael Hunter is the co-founder and CEO of Spear AI, a Washington, D.C. defense technology company turning the ocean's underwater noise into usable intelligence. A former Navy intelligence analyst who deployed to Baghdad with SEAL Team Two and later led AI projects inside the Pentagon's Project Maven, Hunter started Spear AI in 2021 with retired submarine commander John McGunnigle. The company builds software, modular sensors, and engineering services that help the U.S. Navy and commercial partners label and make sense of maritime acoustic data at the edge.