darpa
(9)
Product Genius
Product Genius is a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company that builds a personalized, TikTok-style shopping feed for Shopify stores. Its platform, powered by what the company calls Large Interaction Models (LIMs), learns from each shopper's swipes, clicks and scrolls to assemble an individualized homepage of products, videos, reviews and Q&A. Founded by MIT PhD and deep-learning hardware pioneer Ben Vigoda, the company grew out of roughly $35 million in DARPA research and reports a median +20% lift in revenue per session, with controlled A/B tests showing a 36% average revenue lift across 25 brands including Betsey Johnson.
Array Labs
Array Labs designs, builds, and operates radar satellites that fly in coordinated clusters to image the same place on Earth from many angles at once. By distributing the radar across many small, mass-manufacturable satellites instead of one large bespoke spacecraft, the company aims to produce continuously refreshed, high-resolution 3D maps of the planet - a form of space-based radar it likens to what SpaceX did for launch. Founded in 2021 and based in Redwood City, California, Array Labs raised a $20M Series A in January 2026 to scale radar manufacturing and prepare to launch the world's first formation-flying radar satellite cluster.
Carecubes
Carecubes makes the Carecube, an FDA 510(k)-cleared negative-pressure isolation canopy that turns any standard hospital bed into an airborne-isolation unit in about 20 minutes. Born from a DARPA-funded Ebola-era project at San Francisco research lab Otherlab, the device pulls air through an H14 HEPA filter, holds negative pressure, and lets caregivers reach patients through glove walls - isolating the pathogen instead of the patient. The Arden Hills, Minnesota company closed a $6.5M Series A in March 2026 and has deployed across dozens of communities and health systems.
Diffraqtion
Diffraqtion is a Somerville, Massachusetts deeptech company building what it calls the first quantum camera for satellites and telescopes. Spun out of research at MIT and the University of Maryland, its photon-counting sensors paired with AI aim to extract far more information from incoming light than conventional CMOS or CCD sensors, letting smaller, cheaper optics see beyond the diffraction limit. The company targets space domain awareness, defense, and Earth observation, and raised $4.2M in pre-seed funding in January 2026 alongside a DARPA SBIR contract.
S2 Corporation
S2 Corporation is a Bozeman, Montana photonics company that reads the radio spectrum the way a hologram stores an image - all at once. Its core technology, spatial-spectral (S2) holography, uses a cooled, sugar-cube-sized crystal doped with rare-earth atoms as an optical computer that captures and processes radio frequencies across enormous instantaneous bandwidths (0.03 to 110 GHz). Packaged as the Extreme Bandwidth Analyzer and Correlator (EBAC), the technology serves electronic warfare, signals intelligence, RF spectrum monitoring, emitter geolocation, and data mining for U.S. defense and intelligence customers including DARPA and IARPA.
PowerLight Technologies
PowerLight Technologies is a Kent, Washington-based engineering company that transmits electricity through the air using lasers. Spun out of the original LaserMotive (founded 2006 by Tom Nugent and Jordin Kare), PowerLight builds end-to-end power beaming systems that keep drones flying for hours, relay energy across kilometers of free space, and underpin DARPA initiatives for terrestrial, aerial, and lunar power transmission.
DUST Identity
DUST Identity authenticates physical objects with a thin coat of engineered diamond dust. Each randomly oriented constellation of microscopic diamonds forms a fingerprint that cannot be copied, and that fingerprint is bound to a tamper-evident digital record. The result is an unbroken chain of trust from raw material to final delivery, used across aerospace, defense, electronics, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia.
Artis
Artis, LLC (Advanced Real-Time Information Systems) is a Herndon, Virginia defense and technology developer that builds systems for problems measured in microseconds. Founded in 1999 by Keith Brendley, the company is best known for active protection systems for military vehicles - Iron Curtain and its third-generation successor, Sentinel - that detect and defeat incoming rockets, missiles and drone-borne threats in fractions of a second. Beyond defense, Artis applies its high-speed sensing and parallel-processing work to highway worker safety, 3D imaging and pedestrian monitoring.
EnCharge AI
EnCharge AI is a Santa Clara semiconductor startup, spun out of Princeton University, building AI accelerator chips based on analog in-memory computing. Its charge-based architecture runs heavy AI workloads on laptops, workstations and edge devices at roughly 20x the energy efficiency of conventional GPUs. Its first product, the EN100 accelerator, delivers 200+ TOPS within an 8.25W power budget, aiming to move generative AI out of the data center and onto the devices people actually hold.