defense-innovation
(3)John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Will Roper
Will Roper is a physicist-turned-defense-strategist who now runs Istari Digital, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup trying to build an 'engineering metaverse' where machines from satellites to medicines can be designed, tested and certified entirely in software. Before founding Istari in 2022, he was the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, steering a roughly $40-60 billion annual portfolio, and earlier the founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, where he turned a $50 million budget into a $1.5 billion-plus prototype machine that produced drone swarms, hypervelocity guns and fighter-jet AI co-pilots. A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in string theory, he names his ventures after Tolkien wizards and argues America must learn to make hardware behave like software before its rivals do.
Jeff Karras
Jeff Karras is a General Partner at America's Frontier Fund and co-founder of Alter Venture Partners, bringing over 20 years of venture capital experience to the intersection of deep tech, national security, and U.S. strategic competitiveness. With more than 40 investments and 23 exits - including 6 IPOs - he has backed companies spanning semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, synthetic biology, and AI. Before pivoting to frontier tech, he helped build SingTel Innov8's North American and Israeli operations and spent nearly a decade at Levensohn Venture Partners. A licensed pilot based in San Francisco, he is among a small cohort of investors who believe the most important technology companies of the next decade will emerge from the overlap of commercial innovation and government-scale problems.