Tagged: defense-tech
21 results
Allen Control Systems
Allen Control Systems (ACS) is an Austin-based defense technology company building Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous robotic weapon station designed to detect, track and shoot down hostile drones. Founded in 2022 by three engineer-entrepreneurs, ACS uses passive machine vision and custom fire-control software to turn standard machine guns into precision counter-drone turrets, aiming to cut the cost-per-kill of a drone from expensive missiles down to a few dollars of ammunition. The company raised a $200M Series B in 2026 at a $2.2B valuation to scale manufacturing for the U.S. military and allied forces.
Bulzi, Inc.
Bulzi, Inc. (styled Bulzī, pronounced 'bulls-eye') is a dual-use technology company that uses edge-AI and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to deliver situational awareness, security, and safety solutions. Originally built to measure out-of-home advertising audiences by passively detecting nearby mobile devices, Bulzi adapted its RF-sensing platform for defense and public-safety missions with roughly $2M in SBIR funding from the U.S. Air Force and Army. Its products span passive C5ISR sensing (SAFER), base access control (z-BASE), and medical-grade vital-signs monitoring (BioSCOUT), serving warfighters and first responders alongside commercial advertising customers.
Knox Systems, Inc.
Knox Systems is an Austin, Texas company that operates a pre-authorized, AI-managed federal cloud so that commercial SaaS vendors can reach FedRAMP authorization in roughly 90 days for about 90% less than the traditional cost. By running a shared, continuously monitored compliance boundary across AWS, Azure, and GCP, Knox lets customer applications inherit 60-80% of required security controls on day one, then automates evidence collection, documentation, and remediation. Founded in 2023 by Irina Denisenko, the company raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 and serves vendors such as Adobe, Celonis, OutSystems, Armis, and BigID across 15+ federal agency authorizations.
Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies builds software platforms that integrate large, messy data sets and put them to work for decision-making. Founded in 2003 in the shadow of PayPal's fraud-detection work, the company sells four flagship products - Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) - to governments, defense and intelligence agencies, and commercial enterprises in finance, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing. Led by co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Palantir has grown from a controversial government contractor into a fast-growing public company riding demand for operational AI.
Aurelius Systems
Aurelius Systems is a San Francisco defense-technology startup building Archimedes, an autonomous, high-powered laser turret that detects, tracks and neutralizes drones in seconds for roughly the cost of electricity. Founded in 2024 by photonics veterans Michael LaFramboise and John Marmaduke, the company fuses commercial off-the-shelf hardware, advanced optics and AI-guided targeting into a compact, low-cost counter-UAS platform aimed at protecting soldiers and critical infrastructure from cheap, swarming aerial threats.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Parallel Works
Parallel Works is a Chicago-based software company, spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015, that builds ACTIVATE - a hybrid multi-cloud control plane for high-performance computing and AI. The platform gives researchers, engineers and defense teams a single interface to provision, orchestrate and share compute across on-premises clusters and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle), with built-in cost governance, role-based access and security controls. In 2025 ACTIVATE's High Security Platform became the first hybrid multi-cloud solution to earn a U.S. Department of Defense IL5 Authority to Operate.
oneNav, Inc.
oneNav is a Silicon Valley semiconductor startup building the world's first L5-direct GNSS receiver - a chip architecture that skips the aging GPS L1 band entirely and uses the modern L5 satellite signal to deliver positioning that is more accurate, lower-power, and far harder to jam or spoof. Founded in 2019 by Steve Poizner and Dr. Paul McBurney, the company sells IP cores and ASICs to smartphone, wearable, IoT and defense customers.
True Anomaly
True Anomaly is a Colorado-based space defense company building the hardware and software to operate, defend, and win in contested orbit. Its flagship Jackal autonomous orbital vehicle - a highly maneuverable, refrigerator-sized spacecraft - is paired with Mosaic, a full-stack mission autonomy and command-and-control platform. Founded in 2022 by Air Force and Space Force veterans, the company sells primarily to the U.S. Space Force and Department of the Air Force, has raised more than $1 billion across four rounds, and is valued at $2.2 billion after its April 2026 Series D.
CHAOS Industries
CHAOS Industries is a Los Angeles defense technology company building Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN), software-defined sensing systems that detect aerial and missile threats faster and cheaper than traditional radar. Founded in 2022, it makes distributed radar products like Vanquish and Astria for counter-drone, border, and homeland defense. By late 2025 the company had raised over $1 billion and reached a roughly $4.5 billion valuation.
Armada
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
Anirban Gangopadhyay
Anirban Gangopadhyay is the co-founder and CTO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform serving small and mid-sized businesses across 44 U.S. states. A Columbia University computer scientist and former Palantir machine learning engineer, he previously served as a Stokes Scholar at the U.S. Department of Defense and co-founded Zircon Technologies - an AI-enabled clinical trial recruitment startup that was acquired - before building Angle Health through Y Combinator's W20 batch. Angle Health raised $134 million in a December 2025 Series B and has grown revenue 26x since its Series A, with a mission to redesign healthcare delivery through AI-first technology.
John Gedmark
John Gedmark is the CEO and Co-founder of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based aerospace company building next-generation geostationary satellites. He previously helped shape the commercial space industry as co-founder and executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, where he influenced President Obama's 2010 decision to use commercial space transportation for NASA missions - a shift worth over $10 billion to the industry. At Astranis, he has led the company from a Y Combinator startup to a $2.8 billion valuation with a $1+ billion backlog, operating a fleet of MicroGEO satellites that bring dedicated broadband to underserved regions across Alaska, the Philippines, Mexico, and beyond.
Kyle Moore
Kyle Moore is co-founder and Software Fellow at Pyka, the Alameda, California company building the world's largest commercially-approved autonomous electric aircraft. A self-taught programmer who started writing code at age 11 from rural Washington, Moore brought firmware and robotics expertise from Google X to help design Pyka's Pelican — a 1,320-lb autonomous electric aircraft now spraying crops across four continents and delivering cargo for the U.S. Air Force. Pyka has raised $95M in total funding and achieved back-to-back FAA authorizations for the largest uncrewed aircraft systems in U.S. commercial history.
Steve Poizner
Steve Poizner is a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold GPS-in-cell-phones pioneer SnapTrack to Qualcomm for $1 billion, served as California Insurance Commissioner, ran for governor, taught high school for a year, wrote a New York Times bestseller, and is now back in the lab as Co-Founder and CEO of oneNav - building the world's first L5-direct GNSS receiver ASIC to make GPS jamming-proof for drones, autonomous vehicles, and defense applications.
Peter Morales
Peter Morales is the CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, a Boston-based AI company that hit unicorn status in February 2026 after raising a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures. With a background spanning BAE Systems (F-35 ML optimization), MIT Lincoln Laboratory (counter-drone AI), and Microsoft (HoloLens computer vision), Morales built Code Metal to solve a gap he discovered firsthand: AI can generate code fast, but mission-critical industries — defense, automotive, semiconductors — need proof that code is correct before it ships. Code Metal's verifiable AI platform translates high-level code into hardware-optimized, mathematically verified production code for edge devices, drones, FPGAs, and autonomous systems. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, Raytheon, Toshiba, and Bosch.
Trae Stephens
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Marcus Zimmerman
Marcus Zimmerman dropped out of Stanford two quarters shy of graduation to co-found Candor (YC W25), an AI platform that helps defense, biotech, and energy startups win U.S. government funding. Before building Candor, he led Stanford's DEFCON Tech and National Security Network, served as a Defense Innovation Scholar at Stanford's Gordian Knot Center, and sourced deals as a Venture Partner at GoAhead Ventures in Menlo Park. He sits at the rare intersection of venture capital, national security, and applied AI.
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Joe Lonsdale
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.
Katherine Boyle
Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the American Dynamism practice - a $1.1B+ fund focused on startups that serve the national interest. A former Washington Post journalist turned VC, she champions defense tech, manufacturing, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies. She sits on the boards of Anduril Industries and The Free Press, and is widely regarded as one of tech's most important bridges between Silicon Valley and Washington.