defense
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Lisa Atherton and the education of an unlikely CEO
An ice cream franchise, an Air Force budget office and a tiltrotor program helped prepare Lisa Atherton to lead Textron. Her career makes a case for taking the next job seriously before imagining the one after it.
Jim Taiclet and the space between the machines
He learned to lead in a transport cockpit and spent 17 years running a cell-tower business. At Lockheed Martin, Jim Taiclet is betting that the connections between machines can matter as much as the machines themselves.
Kerem Ozmen and the Cost of Making Things Real
From Reno’s startup community to nuclear power, remote computing and electric racing, Kerem Ozmen has built an investing career around a stubborn question: what does it take to get an ambitious machine into the world?
Matthew Ritchie and the business of keeping the lights on
After years in aerospace operations, Matthew Ritchie co-founded Collective Manufacturing Group to give established shops another chapter. His first acquisitions put that promise to work, from a reopened Indiana factory to a Connecticut picnic that stayed on the calendar.
Jackie Helfrich Sells the Invisible Parts That Hold the World Together
She markets connectors and sensors most people never see - the components inside airplanes, hospitals, factories and power grids - and has spent 20 years turning quiet industrial hardware into a story buyers can follow.
Jia Xu
Jia Xu is CEO of SkyGrid, the Austin, Texas company building high-assurance airspace integration software for autonomous and unmanned flight. With a PhD from Stanford, dual master's degrees from Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, and career stints at the RAND Corporation, Airbus, General Atomics, and Honeywell Aerospace, Xu brings rare cross-disciplinary depth to one of aviation's hardest problems: teaching machines to share the sky. Under his leadership since August 2023, SkyGrid pivoted from generic airspace software to become a specialized third-party services provider for advanced air mobility - and was acquired by Wisk Aero (a Boeing subsidiary) in June 2025.
Johannes Galatsanos
Johannes Galatsanos is Co-Founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, a Boston-based quantum imaging startup that has built a quantum camera capable of recovering 95% of photon information lost by conventional sensors - translating to 20x higher resolution and 1,000x faster image processing than any existing optical system. A multilingual MIT and Oxford graduate with Greek-German roots, Galatsanos pivoted from leading AI and data transformation at Novartis to commercializing a decade of DARPA- and NASA-backed quantum photonics research. Diffraqtion won first prize at SLUSH 2025, secured a $4.2M pre-seed round in January 2026, and is targeting satellite launches for space domain awareness and Earth observation by 2028-2029.
Dan Cook
Dan Cook is the CEO, Co-founder, and Investor at Lyten Inc, a San Jose-based deep-tech company pioneering 3D Graphene supermaterial and next-generation lithium-sulfur batteries. With over three decades spanning General Motors, NeXT Computer (under Steve Jobs), Bay Networks/Nortel, and private equity at Cerberus Capital, Cook pivoted to found Lyten in 2015 around a serendipitous discovery: trying to turn methane into clean hydrogen, the team accidentally created a revolutionary 3D graphene material. Under his leadership, Lyten has raised over $1.2 billion, shipped lithium-sulfur A-samples to automotive and military customers, announced the world's first lithium-sulfur gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, and in 2025-2026 acquired significant Northvolt assets across Europe to become one of the largest battery manufacturers on the continent.
James Crean
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.
Steve Hoover
Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.
Matthew Haber
Matthew Haber is the co-founder and CEO of Cofactr, a New York-based platform that automates procurement and logistics for electronics hardware teams in aerospace, defense, medtech and robotics. A theater-designer-turned-engineer, he built tours for Coachella acts and escape rooms before co-founding an experiential R&D firm (BeSide) that sold to agency MAS in 2018. He launched Cofactr in the Y Combinator W22 batch; in December 2024 the company raised a $17.2M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $28.8M.
Derek Smith
Derek Smith is a four-time serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Mimic, a Palo Alto-based cybersecurity company building ransomware detection and deflection technology that operates at the kernel level. He previously co-founded Oakley Networks (the first data leakage prevention company, acquired by Raytheon in 2007) and Shape Security (the first bot-defense company, acquired by F5 for $1 billion in 2020), and served as Senior Advisor for Cyber-Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Mimic has raised $77 million in total funding, including a $50M Series A led by GV and Menlo Ventures.
Jonas Schneider
Jonas Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Daedalus, an AI-powered precision manufacturing company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, building the factory of the future. A former OpenAI technical lead and co-founder of its robotics team, Schneider left Silicon Valley in 2019 to solve a problem he lived firsthand: getting precision-manufactured parts takes months, and the world's most advanced machines sit idle 80% of the time. Daedalus deploys proprietary AI software across CNC shop floors to double machine utilization, catch defects in real time, and preserve tacit manufacturing knowledge before it disappears with retiring machinists. The company has raised $41.1M in total funding, including a $21M Series A led by NGP Capital in February 2024, and operates a 50,000-square-foot factory serving defense, medical devices, aerospace, and semiconductor clients.
Jonny Dyer
Jonny Dyer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Muon Space, a Mountain View-based end-to-end satellite constellation company building mission-optimized spacecraft for Earth intelligence, wildfire detection, and national security. A Stanford mechanical engineer who pitched varsity baseball and co-authored rocket propulsion models, he turned Skybox Imaging into Google's $500M acquisition, ran Google Maps' data collection fleet, led Lyft's autonomous vehicle platform, and then founded Muon in 2021. The company has raised $146M in Series B funding and operates a growing constellation including FireSat - a 50-satellite wildfire-monitoring system developed with Earth Fire Alliance.
Michael Norcia
Michael Norcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pyka, the world's first FAA-certified autonomous electric aviation company. Based in Alameda, California, Pyka builds large-scale autonomous electric aircraft for agricultural crop protection and cargo logistics. Norcia — a UC Davis applied physics grad who cut his teeth engineering firmware and power systems at Zee Aero, Joby Aviation, and Kittyhawk — founded Pyka in 2017 (Y Combinator S17) with a pragmatic thesis: skip the flying cars, solve the problems aviation already has. Today Pyka's Pelican aircraft spray hundreds of acres per hour across the US, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil, and the company is expanding into defense with a new platform called DropShip.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour
Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the co-founder and CEO of Loft Orbital, the San Francisco-based company that turned satellite deployment from a multi-year aerospace engineering odyssey into something closer to provisioning a cloud server. A French aerospace engineer by training — ISAE-SUPAERO class of 2008, master's from University of Michigan — he cut his teeth at ESA, NASA, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and was among the first hires at Spire Global before co-founding Loft Orbital in 2017 with Alex Greenberg and Antoine de Chassy. Under his leadership, the company reached unicorn status in January 2025 with a $170M Series C, surpassed $500M in cumulative bookings, and is now building the default AI execution layer for orbital infrastructure.
Ryan McLinko
Ryan McLinko is the co-founder and CTO of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based company building compact, software-defined geostationary satellites to bring affordable broadband to underserved regions worldwide. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who cut his teeth on cubesats at Planet Labs and the Dream Chaser spaceplane at Sierra Nevada, McLinko co-founded Astranis in 2015 with CEO John Gedmark. The company has since launched five satellites, secured over $1.2 billion in funding including a $450M Series E in May 2026, and been named Prime Contractor for multiple U.S. Space Force programs — all while being valued at $2.8 billion.
Douglas Friedman
Douglas Friedman is CEO of BioMADE, the U.S. Department of Defense-funded Manufacturing Innovation Institute dedicated to growing the domestic industrial biomanufacturing ecosystem. With a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern and a career spanning the National Academies, the White House OSTP, and the founding of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, Friedman is one of the foremost architects of America's bioeconomy strategy — arguing that biology, not silicon, may define the next great manufacturing revolution.
Frank Ferrante
Frank Ferrante is the CEO of ForwardEdge ASIC, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary dedicated to advancing U.S. domestic semiconductor chip design. A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ferrante has held leadership roles at Intel (Senior Director of Military, Aerospace and Government), Wolfspeed (VP of Worldwide Automotive Sales and Marketing), and Altera. He is a vocal advocate for U.S. advanced manufacturing policy, having advised policymakers on the CHIPS Act, SHIP, and RAMP-C initiatives. Under his leadership, ForwardEdge ASIC achieved U.S. Government Trusted IC Vendor Status in February 2026 and selected the MIPS S8200 for mission-critical autonomous platform ASICs.
Charles Wong
Charles Wong is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bifrost AI, a San Francisco-based generative 3D data platform that lets robotics, aerospace, maritime, and industrial teams train and test AI models in hours instead of months. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree from Singapore, Wong built Bifrost after working on AI perception models for autonomous vehicles at NuTonomy (an MIT spinout). Bifrost has raised $13.7M in total funding, counts NASA JPL and the U.S. Air Force among its clients, and generates synthetic datasets for some of the world's most demanding physical-world AI challenges - from Mars rover navigation to maritime collision avoidance.
John Keh
John Keh is the Founder and CEO of Valtec, a San Diego-based maritime AI and drone company that deploys autonomous VTOL systems on commercial fishing vessels to detect tuna schools in real time. A UC Berkeley alumnus and former US Air Force geospatial intelligence analyst with 250+ missions across South Korea and the Middle East, Keh pivoted from food delivery (3rd employee at Caviar, Uber Eats courier intelligence lead) to maritime defense after four years building startups in Taiwan. Valtec raised a $2M pre-seed round in March 2025 backed by SparkLabs Taiwan, Wavemaker VC, DRONE FUND, Guitar Hero founder Kai Huang, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, with the company's Larus VTOL drone and Fulcan AI platform now deployed on 40+ fishing vessels across Taiwan and the Philippines.
Vishnu Sridhar
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.
Adam Bry
Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO of Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight. A childhood R/C aerobatics national champion turned MIT robotics researcher, he turned down a DJI acquisition in 2014 to bet everything on autonomy — and won. Today Skydio has deployed over 60,000 drones to every branch of the U.S. military, 1,200+ public safety agencies, and 45 of 51 state transportation departments, with a $4.4 billion valuation and $3.5 billion U.S. manufacturing expansion underway.
Jai Malik
Jai Malik is the founder and CEO of Amca (Advanced Manufacturing Company of America), an aerospace and defense manufacturer that launched in April 2025 with $76.5M from Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. A serial entrepreneur and self-described 'industrial capitalist,' Malik previously founded Countdown Capital (2020-2024), an early-stage hard tech venture fund, after stints as an early team member at AI defense startups Accrete and Forge.AI. He also serves as Venture Partner at Redbud VC in Columbia, MO. Amca's thesis: acquire legacy aerospace suppliers and rebuild them from the inside out, starting with a 60-year-old avionics supplier in El Monte, California.