Magrathea is an Oakland, California clean-tech company rebuilding American magnesium production. Using a next-generation electrolytic process, it makes magnesium metal from seawater and brines with near-zero carbon emissions, aiming to break the West's dependence on Chinese supply for a metal critical to aerospace, automotive, and defense.
TurbineOne builds Mission-AI for the frontlines. Its flagship Frontline Perception System (FPS) puts machine learning directly on the sensor at the tactical edge - no cloud, no coding, no connectivity required - so warfighters can detect, identify, and act on threats in real time. Founded in 2021 by Navy veteran Ian Kalin and former Amazon engineer Matt Amacker, the company is deployed across all branches of the U.S. military and reached a roughly $300M valuation with its 2025 Series B.
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
Rahul Raina is the Co-Founder and CTO of TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that helps governments, financial institutions, and crypto businesses detect and investigate financial crime on the blockchain. Born out of a failed game startup, TRM Labs now serves 600+ government agencies across 75+ countries, achieved unicorn status in February 2026 with a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation, and is recognized as a leading force in making the crypto ecosystem safer. Rahul was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022.
Sean Moriarty is the CEO of Primer.ai, a San Francisco-based AI company delivering trusted, mission-critical artificial intelligence to defense agencies, intelligence communities, and enterprise clients. A veteran technology executive who began as a QA engineer at Citysearch in 1997 alongside future founders of OpenTable and Peloton, Moriarty went on to run Ticketmaster as its President and CEO, transforming it into a top-5 global internet commerce company with $1.5 billion in annual revenue across 22 countries. After stints as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and CEO of Saatchi Art and Leaf Group, he joined Primer in April 2023 to lead its mission of providing AI-enabled information advantage to those who support and defend democracy. The son of a Vietnam veteran and grandson of a WWII veteran, Moriarty brings both personal conviction and hard-won operational expertise to one of the most consequential AI deployments in the world.
TRM Labs is a blockchain intelligence company that helps financial institutions, crypto businesses, and government agencies investigate fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes on-chain. Its platform blends blockchain data, AI agents, and threat intelligence to trace illicit funds across hundreds of blockchains, screen wallets, and support criminal investigations from suspicious-activity alerts to courtroom-ready evidence.
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.
Esteban Castano is the Co-founder and CEO of TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company he built into a billion-dollar unicorn on a mission to fight crypto crime. A Dartmouth-educated, Stanford MBA dropout, Castano co-founded TRM in 2018 after recognizing that the coming wave of digital asset adoption would need a trust layer - a platform to detect fraud, trace illicit funds, and keep crypto safe for governments, banks, and legitimate users. With $279.9M raised, clients including Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, and the US Department of Justice, and the world's first FedRAMP High-authorized blockchain intelligence platform, TRM Labs now sits at the center of crypto's fight against money laundering, terrorism financing, and organized crime.
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 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.
Eric Emerson Schmidt is a billionaire technologist, former Google CEO, and relentless polymath who quietly shaped the digital age while most of us were still figuring out dial-up. After steering Google from scrappy startup to global colossus (2001-2011), he pivoted to national security advisory, quantum computing ventures, ocean research, and as of March 2025, rocket manufacturing as CEO of Relativity Space. With a net worth around $54.5 billion, five co-authored books on AI, and philanthropic commitments exceeding $1 billion, Schmidt operates at the intersection of geopolitics, frontier science, and Silicon Valley ambition.
Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta Platforms. Born in 1997 to Chinese immigrant physicists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to build Scale AI, which became the backbone of AI training data infrastructure for companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 24, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Scale AI grew to a ~$29B valuation after Meta's $14.8B strategic investment in 2025, and Wang now leads Meta's AI superintelligence efforts.
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.
Jordan Schneider is the founder and editor-in-chief of ChinaTalk, the premier independent newsletter and podcast covering US-China tech and policy. A Yale-educated historian who earned a master's in economics from Peking University's Yenching Academy, Schneider has built ChinaTalk into a 65,000-subscriber powerhouse with over 1 million podcast downloads in 2025 alone. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a former 2023-24 AWM Scholar, with bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wired, and Lawfare. Based in New York and fluent in Chinese, Schneider synthesizes elite policy analysis with accessible storytelling, covering semiconductors, AI development, export controls, and the full sweep of US-China competition.
Wardstone is a Y Combinator F25 defense startup building a global constellation of satellites equipped with space-based interceptors to kinetically destroy hypersonic and ballistic missiles. Founded by brothers Sebastian and Tobias Fischer, the company is pursuing America's Golden Dome initiative - a layered missile defense system that can engage threats in space before they reach US soil. With a $5M seed round and three successful automated intercept demonstrations during YC, Wardstone is positioning itself as a next-generation missile defense contractor targeting a $40B/year market.
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.