Joel Anderson

Joel Anderson is the founder and CEO of ZeroMark, a New York defense-technology startup building an AI-and-robotics fire control system that turns ordinary infantry rifles into auto-aiming counter-drone weapons. A U.S. Navy veteran who went on to help scale MongoDB from a small team to a public company as a senior technical and security leader, Anderson founded ZeroMark in 2022 after an 'epiphany' driving his Tesla to a shooting range: consumer machines could aim and track better than a soldier could. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund and Ground Up Ventures, ZeroMark markets what it calls a 'handheld Iron Dome' - a motorized buttstock and sensor pod that make hitting a small drone at 200 yards, in Anderson's words, 'as easy as hitting a 60-foot-diameter circle.'