veteran-founder
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Joel Barthelemy and the 13-Hour Problem
A monthly bus ride across Minnesota gave Joel Barthelemy a problem worth keeping. Two decades later, the company he built around it is still trying to make distance matter less.
Brian Butler Built a Second Career by Listening First
After 22 years in the Army, a White House policy post and a bruising civilian transition, Brian Butler started over at home. He built Vistra by carrying one military habit into business: listen before you lead.
Nekesa Echols Built a Business Around One Point of Accountability
An 18-year Army veteran turned founder, Echols is building a Texas contractor around a deceptively simple promise: one team owns the work from first survey to final system.
Terry Broussard Turned One Bad Night of RV Planning Into a Booking Business
A four-time RV owner handed his son-in-law a phone and issued a simple challenge: find us a campsite tonight. The frustrating search became Spot2Nite - and a lesson in building software from a problem you know by heart.
Boots Dunlap Built a Lending Career by Walking Toward the Mess
From combat leadership to post-crash loan workouts, the RRA Capital co-founder has made a practice of entering difficult markets with clear eyes, patient capital and a bias toward strong teams.
Jim Evans Built a Company for the Unflashy Work That Makes Everything Else Work
A West Point engineer moved from airborne operations to Wall Street, military housing and global retail programs. Then he built Sevan around a durable idea: complicated work gets easier when one team owns the handoffs.
Eric Styles Built a Security Company Around Three Words: I’ve Got Your Back
The YourSix CEO turned an Army phrase into a company promise - then built a partner-led cloud platform designed to replace rooms of security hardware with one operating system.
Luke Fischer
Luke Fischer is the co-founder and CEO of SkyFi, an Austin-based Earth intelligence platform that lets businesses and governments order satellite imagery and analytics on demand, the way you'd hail an Uber. A former U.S. Army Special Operations aviator with 16 years on active duty, Fischer went on to lead flight operations at Uber and government operations at Joby Aviation before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Shield Capital. He teamed up with investor Bill Perkins, who was frustrated that buying satellite imagery could take three to six months, and together they built a marketplace connecting more than 50 imagery providers. In January 2026 SkyFi raised an oversubscribed $12.7 million Series A to push deeper into AI-driven analytics.
Philong Duong
Philong Duong is CEO and co-founder of NODA AI, an Austin-based defense technology company building an AI-native orchestration platform (Urza) that acts as the 'chess player' coordinating heterogeneous unmanned and manned assets across vendors. A Marine Corps veteran, former CH-46E and MV-22B pilot, and JTAC on multiple Middle East deployments, he was C3.ai's first Federal Product Manager, helping scale its federal ARR from under $1M to nearly $100M. NODA closed a $25M Series A in February 2026 led by Bessemer at a $125M valuation.
Garrett Smith
Garrett Smith is the founder and CEO of Reveal Technology, a Bozeman, Montana defense-tech company that turns drone video into offline 3D maps and runs mobile biometrics on a phone at the tactical edge. A former U.S. Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer who still serves in the reserves, Smith built the company he wished he had in combat, where he was making high-stakes decisions off pen-and-paper maps in a digital war. Reveal's Farsight and Identifi platforms are used by U.S. Special Operations, the Army, the Marines, and allied forces in Ukraine, the UK, and Israel. In July 2025 the company closed a $30 million Series B led by Ballistic Ventures.
Luis Alvarez
Luis Alvarez is the founder and CEO of Theradaptive, a Frederick, Maryland biotech engineering proteins that latch onto implants and surgical materials to trigger the body to regrow bone, cartilage, and other tissue exactly where it is needed. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and MIT-trained biological engineer, he traced the idea back to a combat tour in Iraq, where soldiers under his command lost limbs to delayed amputations. Theradaptive has since won multiple FDA Breakthrough Device Designations, raised more than $43 million, and moved its lead protein, AMP2, into human clinical trials.
Kris Sandor
Kris Sandor is the co-founder and CEO of Readyly, an agentic AI platform automating customer support and public services for governments and enterprises. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer turned McKinsey consultant, Palantir business lead, and CEO of Citi Bike (acquired by Lyft in 2018), he now builds AI agents that replace decision-tree chatbots across voice, chat, and email.
Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'