ABOUT ARIYAN KABIR

Ariyan Kabir is the co-founder and CEO of GrayMatter Robotics. He started the company in early 2020 alongside two co-founders, building on PhD research conducted at USC’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing, where he and one co-founder studied the intersection of robotics and AI. The third co-founder, chief scientist Satyandra K. Gupta, has spent more than 35 years working at the intersection of AI, robotics, and manufacturing and sits on multiple national boards.

Ariyan’s framing of the problem is shaped by a realization that came from the academic environment: that manufacturing (long assumed to be “solved”) is in fact one of the largest unaddressed application areas for modern AI. The US is currently short half a million skilled manufacturing workers, a gap projected to reach four million in seven years and put $2 trillion of annual GDP at risk.

ABOUT GRAYMATTER ROBOTICS

GrayMatter Robotics builds the autonomy layer for high-mix, high-variability manufacturing, the roughly 90% of factory work that cannot be addressed by traditional pre-programmed robotics. The company’s robots perform tool-manipulation tasks: sanding, grinding, polishing, buffing, coating, blasting, and inspection. Underneath the robots sits the company’s real differentiator: a foundation model for materials and processes, trained on what Ariyan describes as the largest manufacturing process dataset in the world: 7 petabytes of multimodal sensor data spanning 14–18 modalities per cell.

The business is now six years old. This interview was recorded at the company’s 100,000 sq ft Physical AI Experience Center in Carson, California, which is the company’s fifth facility. Today, GrayMatter’s customers include Boeing, Raytheon, Oshkosh, Caterpillar, Riddell, the US Navy, the US Air Force, and Huntington Ingalls Industries, where GrayMatter is a partner on the HYPR (High Yield Production Robotics) program designing the next-generation American shipyard.

The company sells outcomes, not hardware. Robots are deployed on a subscription basis with multi-year commitments, and performance compounds quarterly through software updates, recipe upgrades, and hardware refreshes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Sequence the market. Commercial first, defense second.

GrayMatter spent its first three-plus years building almost entirely in the commercial world, despite the obvious dual-use relevance of factory automation. Their reasoning was that defense customers tolerate zero failure, and an unproven autonomy stack cannot debug itself inside an aircraft program. By the time the company turned toward national security work, they had already validated the technology, the business model, and the deployment muscle.

2. The business model can be the product.

Performance Composites — GrayMatter’s first customer — had been searching for a robotic sanding solution for five years before the conversation with GrayMatter. IT wasn’t so much a capability they were missing as it was a different risk appetite: manufacturers cannot tie up millions of dollars in Capex on unproven technology. GrayMatter’s response was to invert the deal entirely: zero upfront cost, deployment first, subscription payments only after the system was producing value in production. In exchange, the customer committed to a multi-year contract. The structure became the wedge that opened the entire Fortune 100.

3. Adoption became the geostrategic moat.

Asked how 7 petabytes of US manufacturing data compares to South Korea or Shenzhen, Ariyan reframed the question. The race isn’t about dataset size. The US ranks near the bottom of the top 10 in robot-to-worker adoption ratios; South Korea is #1 and China is climbing fast. Tonnage-wise, China has built more ships in the last 12 months than the US has built since WWII. This reframing has direct strategic implications: a defense industrial base strategy that focuses on technology sovereignty without obsessing over diffusion velocity will lose to one that does the opposite.

4. GrayMatter builds AI into every layer.

GrayMatter identifies eight distinct layers of engineering work that sit between a customer problem and a delivered outcome: industrial engineering, solution engineering, process recipe engineering, cell design, tool/fixture design, implementation, sustainment, and digital-twin operations. Most robotics companies put AI in one layer: the robot. This means the other seven can become bottlenecks. But GrayMatter is now deploying domain agents at every layer, coordinated by an orchestration layer the company calls Factory Super Intelligence (FSI). The focus on under-appreciated elements of the solution set has helped them differentiate.

5. Hire from the intersection. The mixing room doesn’t work.

GrayMatter’s most expensive hiring lesson was that you cannot assemble a great physical AI team by recruiting the best AI specialists, the best manufacturing engineers, and the best roboticists into a room. The translation cost is too high; each discipline optimizes for its own definition of the problem. What does work is hiring people who already live at the intersection of at least two of the three domains, then leveling them up on the third. The company’s head of customers came from Tesla. Their head of aerospace and defense was two steps below Boeing’s CTO. Their head of hardware also came from Tesla. This was a counterintuitive lesson, but one that stuck with me most from the conversation.

Follow Ariyan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariyankabir/

For more GrayMatter: https://factory.graymatter-robotics.com/

For more Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Ben Cipperley spent 26 years in the Navy. The first 18 he served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal office, with three tours across the Indo-Pacific, three years between Iraq and Afghanistan, and command in Guam. Which is to say, he has more experience than most.

What makes his background unusual isn’t the operational experience; plenty of veterans make the transition. It’s the Pentagon chapter that came after. A fellowship at the Stimson Center led to a resource sponsor role writing the Navy’s budget, which led to being pulled onto the team drafting the 2022 National Defense Strategy (mid-process, while Russian forces were marshaling in Belarus). Which led to working under the CNO on what became the Navy’s first force design document in 50 years. It’s a classified vision for the fleet in 2045 that, he notes, had quite a few robots in it.

He put an “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn when he retired. The CEO of Havoc called him 20 minutes later.

About HavocAI

HavocAI is a collaborative autonomy software company. The pitch is deceptively simple: one operator, thousands of autonomous systems. The technology is the connective tissue, the software layer that lets a surface drone, an aerial drone, and a ground vehicle share a common operational picture and respond to commands from a single interface, rather than requiring separate operators, separate control systems, and separate data pipes for each platform.

The company was born from a conference convened by then-Undersecretary of Defense Heidi Shyu around the concept of “Hellscape,” IndoPaCom’s deterrence concept for a Taiwan scenario involving massive swarms of autonomous systems. The question in the room wasn’t whether the platforms existed. It was: how do you make thousands of them work together when a human brain can only track so many things at once? Founders Paul Lwin and Joe Turner quit their jobs the next day and started building the answer.

Early validation came through Silent Swarm, an exercise run by Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. Havoc showed up with 12 prototypes of their Rampage platform. Representatives from NIWC Atlantic watched, then bought the prototypes on the spot. Those units shipped to Portugal to support Task Force 66. That’s the loop Havoc is now trying to close, and why they recently acquired Mavrik (air) and Teleo (ground) to make good on the multi-domain part of the pitch.

The business model is worth understanding clearly. The government is bad at buying software. It tends to need software wrapped in a hardware container before it can conceptually acquire it. Havoc has internalized this and partnered with eight different maritime platform builders, plus air and ground hardware partners, so that their autonomy stack arrives pre-integrated with best-of-breed hardware. They’re trying to be the OS layer that makes everyone else’s platforms work together. But they’ll sell you the hardware too, because that’s how you get the check.

The Lessons

1. The problem the government actually has isn’t the problem it says it has.

Ben draws a sharp distinction between what defense procurement documents say and what operators actually need. There are no formal capability development documents specifying what a medium unmanned surface vessel needs to do. The requirements that exist are top-level (e.g., speed, payload, endurance) without a mission profile to lay them against. This creates a strange situation: companies are trying to satisfy requirements that aren’t fully written yet, for operators who know what they want but can’t always articulate it in the language acquisition needs.

Havoc’s origin story reflects a clearer version of this: the problem wasn’t the robot. It was the software to make robots work together. Nobody had written that as a requirement. A senior leader named it in a room, two founders heard it, and they went and built it.

2. “Works” is the word doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I am always curious about what people mean when they say “the product works.” I pushed Ben on this at length. His response was that “works” doesn’t mean end-to-end, zero failures. It means you’ve demonstrated a high enough Technology Readiness Level that the government believes you’ve solved a piece of their problem and are worth investing in further.

But there’s a harder version of this. Noah describes watching companies show up to exercises, fail three times, succeed on the fourth attempt, and walk away saying “see, it works” — while the warfighter in the room is mentally writing them off. Ben’s answer: if it doesn’t work, it goes in a Conex box and you never see it again. The military’s decision calculus is binary in a way that startups often underestimate. One bad demo doesn’t just cost you that contract. It costs you credibility with that community for years.

His rule of thumb for whether to attend a government test event: if you can’t define what your success state looks like before you arrive, don’t go. If the government hasn’t clearly outlined the operational problem, and you can’t articulate how your technology solves at least part of it, you need more turns before you’re ready to demonstrate.

3. Scale is the argument, not capability.

The case for autonomy isn’t that autonomous systems are better than destroyers at every task. It’s that you can lose 10% of a drone fleet in a day and replenish it in weeks. You can deploy hundreds of systems fast, replace them fast, and iterate on payloads fast. The learning cycle compresses from years to days. Against an adversary who has spent 30 years developing anti-access/area-denial weapons specifically designed to threaten large surface combatants, the risk calculus of putting a $2.3 billion target in a contested strait is, as Ben puts it, off the charts.

The argument is economic and strategic. And it’s an argument defense tech founders often undersell, because they’re focused on what their product can do rather than what the alternative costs.

4. The insider path is real, but it’s not a shortcut.

Ben’s transition looks clean from the outside: senior Pentagon official with deep relationships joins autonomy company, brings credibility and access. The reality is more complicated. He spent years building understanding at every level of the system, from budget to requirements, acquisition, strategy, and operations.

When he was in the CNOs office, he saw Havoc at an investor conference, brought it back as a recommendation, and helped the CNO’s office start paying attention to what defense tech startups were actually building.

That kind of insider value takes decades to build. Which means the shortcut version (e.g., hiring a recently retired flag officer to open doors) usually doesn’t work the way founders hope. The doors might open, but what matters is what you do once you’re inside.

5. The multi-domain bet is a systems integration bet, not a platform bet.

Havoc’s goal isn’t to own the best aerial drone or the best ground vehicle, but to be the software layer that makes a surface drone, an aerial drone, and a ground vehicle operate as a single coherent system under unified command.

Ben described a hypothetical operational scenario: a maritime ISR platform sees a fast-moving target but can’t track it over the horizon. If it can launch an aerial drone and pass targeting data between them through a common autonomy stack, you’ve created networked warfare from a single operator interface. The value derives from the connections between platforms, and in making those connections simple enough that the person running the operation doesn’t need three separate control consoles and three separate teams.

For more about HavocAI: https://havocai.com/

Follow Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencipperley/

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Crossing the Valley explores the journey from proof of concept to production in defense technology. New episodes weekly.

Luke Fischer is the CEO and co-founder of SkyFi. He is a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot and Special Operations veteran who transitioned through DIU (Defense Innovation Unit), Uber Elevate (as Head of Flight Operations), and Joby Aviation (leading government operations) before founding SkyFi in late 2021. He also spent time as an Entrepreneur in Residence in VC, which gave him direct exposure to what gets funded — and what doesn’t. That multi-domain journey across military, Big Tech, and venture is core to how he built SkyFi.

About SkyFi

SkyFi is a geospatial intelligence marketplace and platform that aggregates satellite imagery and analytics from hundreds of commercial satellite operators — making it accessible to any customer, anywhere, via web or mobile app. Rather than owning or launching satellites, SkyFi sits at the aggregation layer: abstracting away which provider owns the satellite and letting users task imagery or pull analytics with a button press. The business is currently approximately 80% government / 20% commercial, serving customers ranging from top global hedge funds and agriculture companies to Special Operations Forces, NATO, and allied governments across Asia. SkyFi closed its Series A in December 2024.

1. The most strategically valuable position in a fragmented market isn’t owning supply; it’s owning demand data.

Every satellite company in the geospatial ecosystem has a narrow, siloed view of what their customers want: just the buyers who came to them, for their specific imagery type. SkyFi sits above all of them. Because they aggregate demand across hundreds of providers, they accumulate something no individual satellite company can build — a behavioral map of who is buying what, where, and when, across the entire market. Luke is explicit about this: it’s how Uber used location data to place bikes, scooters, and Uber Eats in specific cities. The analytical products SkyFi builds aren’t guesswork; they’re derived from four years of observed customer intent at scale. The business that processes demand will always know more than the business that only fulfills it.

2. When a government customer tells you their own internal tools are useless, write it down. That’s your pitch.

Luke didn’t make up the claim that commercial imagery can solve 97% of what classified assets are currently used for. A government customer told him that. Classified imagery systems are slow, bureaucratic, and rationed; commercial imagery is instant, cheap, and available to anyone with a credit card. The mismatch between what exists and what gets delivered to the warfighter is a distribution problem. SkyFi’s entire government business is built on that one honest sentence from an operator who was frustrated with their own system.

3. Protecting customers becomes a competitive strategy.

Satellite providers — who are simultaneously SkyFi’s supply chain and potential competitors — routinely asked for SkyFi’s customer names, framing it as diligence. Luke refused. He reverse-engineered why they were actually asking (Salesforce, i.e., direct outreach) and built a better diligence process to neutralize the argument. The suppliers eventually came back around because they trusted SkyFi more than the brokers who gave up their customer lists. In this aggregator model, the moment Luke let his suppliers touch the demand side, he would’ve handed them the roadmap to cut him out. The customer list is the moat.

4. Dynamic pricing for geopolitical risk is coming to satellite imagery.

This one didn’t get much airtime, but it’s worth sitting with. SkyFi tracks heat maps of customer tasking behavior. When tasking activity spikes around a particular geographic area, that’s a signal that imagery of that area is becoming more valuable. Luke has Uber’s former dynamic pricing engineers on his team specifically to build this. In a world of escalating conflicts and rapid geopolitical shifts, the pricing of intelligence will eventually reflect real-time demand, just like surge pricing reflects a concert letting out.

5. The biggest adoption barrier for new technology is…

Awareness. As Luke and SkyFi went through NATI DIANA, they found that allied defense ministers and government officials consistently didn’t know that commercial satellite tasking was instant and cheap. They assumed the James Bond spy satellite model — months of budget process, classified clearances, exquisite assets. The awareness gap is real, and it’s not the gap between “interested” and “buying.” It’s the gap between “has no idea this exists” and “interested.” It’s a very different sales motion if you’re informing vs. persuading. And it means the addressable market is almost certainly larger than anyone’s current TAM model accounts for.

For more SkyFi: skyfi.com

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

Follow Luke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukemfischer/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Todd Stiefler is VP of Enterprise at WHOOP, overseeing the company’s B2B and B2G business lines. He brings an unusually cross-functional background to the role: a decade as a Senate defense staffer focused on missile defense and strategic nuclear deterrent, followed by product and commercial leadership roles at GE’s industrial IoT division, LMI, and Palantir. A self-described “tech nerd” and ultra-marathoner who finished the Leadville 100 in 27 hours, Todd found WHOOP the way most people find things that change their lives — by accident, scrolling LinkedIn late one night. He’s been building the company’s defense business ever since.

About WHOOP

WHOOP is a Boston-based wearable technology company focused exclusively on human performance and health optimization. Unlike general-purpose smartwatches, WHOOP does one thing: continuously measures high-fidelity physiological data — heart rate variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and strain — and translates it into actionable metrics around sleep, recovery, and readiness. Its early customers included elite professional athletes, and it has since grown into a mass-market product worn by hundreds of thousands of consumers and, increasingly, military personnel. WHOOP is actively pursuing the DOD enterprise market, partnering with programs like SOCOM’s POTD and the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) initiative. The company’s enterprise division, led by Todd, handles everything from individual unit programs to large-scale institutional deployments.

Key Takeaways

1. Build for your most demanding user first.

In contrast to the “minimally viable product” framework, WHOOP’s early decision to build exclusively for elite athletes — with LeBron James and Michael Phelps among their first 100 customers — wasn’t a marketing stunt, but a product strategy. By targeting the most demanding performance environment, they built something rigorous enough to eventually serve everyone else. That same logic attracted special operators before conventional forces, and conventional forces before institutional DOD programs. They solved for the “edge cases” first rather than the average user, because they were solving their distribution challenge through their product design.

2. But the right product alone isn’t enough… you still have to solve the process.

Todd was direct about what WHOOP got wrong in its early defense push: they had a best-in-class product but hadn’t built the surrounding infrastructure. No contract vehicles. No data sharing agreements. No pricing architecture tuned to government procurement. “The DOD buys from people that solve their process, not their problem.” Getting that right — not just shipping a great device — is what actually enables scale. So while many of us laugh at high-ceiling IDIQs without real funding, the vehicle is a key ingredient.

3. The wearable itself is actually not the intervention.

This was one of the most important points from the episode: motivated, self-selected consumers who buy WHOOP on their own are signaling their desire to change their behavior. Warfighters handed a device in a conference room, with no context, no coaching, and no program design, often won’t. Even though the average warfighter may be more attuned to their body than the average civilian, in this case, if the warfighter doesn’t opt in, the product won’t deliver. This insight is why Todd never sees WHOOP going to a “push to all” rather than a “pull” based sales motion. If it’s foisted upon people, it will not produce the desired effect.

4. In federal sales, relationships and strategic partnerships beat conference booths.

Todd assesses that in the defense market, niche events where you can have real conversations, and partnerships with athlete management system providers who can pull WHOOP into their stack, have been the most valuable sources of leads. Trade show booths? Much less effective. As always, your mileage may vary, but it’s another reinforcing data point suggesting deep, niche relationships beat a larger breadth with high impressions.

5. Sell sustainable programs, not hardware deployments.

Todd’s north star for WHOOP’s next 12 months is helping customers build programs that will still be running in five years. That means bringing in WHOOP’s human performance experts and solution architects early, co-designing integration with existing data platforms, and being the vendor who asks, “What are you actually trying to achieve?” before taking the purchase order.

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com | LinkedIn

For more on WHOOP: WHOOP.com

Follow Todd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddstiefler/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Byron Boots is the co-founder and CEO of Overland AI. Prior to starting the company, he was an associate professor in computer science at the University of Washington, where his research focused on machine learning and robot autonomy. Byron served as principal investigator on DARPA’s Racer program, one of the most ambitious off-road ground autonomy challenges the agency has run since its landmark Grand Challenge series in 2004–2005. It was in that role — out in the field, iterating under adversarial test conditions — that the insight and technology behind Overland AI took shape.

About Overland AI

Overland AI builds autonomous ground vehicle software and systems for the U.S. military. Their flagship platform, ULTRA, is a purpose-built unmanned ground vehicle with upgraded suspension, miniaturized compute, and a suite of sensors including stereo cameras, LiDAR, thermal cameras, and Starlink — capable of GPS-denied navigation in extreme off-road terrain.

The company operates across four primary concept of operations: ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), logistics and resupply, layered protection (including counter-UAS), and breaching. Their go-to-market approach has been almost entirely driven by demonstrated field performance. Initially this came through DARPA experiments, then through DIU and direct work with Army and Marine Corps units. Overland has won contracts including the DIU Ground Vehicle Autonomous Pathways program and is currently focused on scaling into formations and establishing a permanent operational presence with the services.

Key Takeaways

Five principles from Byron’s journey that apply broadly to defense tech founders:

1. Field, first. One of the most counterintuitive decisions Byron made at University of Washington was to hire strong vehicle mechanics as some of his first team members. It’s a simple but counterintuitive logic. You don’t have to build the perfect software in the lab before you put it on the vehicle because if vehicles could be repaired rapidly in the field, the software team could test more aggressively, fail faster, and iterate without fear. Thus, the vehicle mechanics gave the rest of the team leverage.

2. The best BD is performance (with the lights on). Overland AI’s early business development was almost entirely organic. I pressed him on DARPA’s checkered history of transitioning programs, but in this case, DARPA invited the other services to watch their field experiments. Those experiments were credible, because the company often didn’t know what was coming. It wasn’t a PowerPoints brief or a table top conversation; it was an opportunity for customers to see the tech in action. That credibility dramatically accelerated their sales path.

3. Build on top of what works. Byron’s framework for capability development is deliberate: get one robot working reliably, then add a second, then build multi-vehicle coordination. Don’t architect for the end state. Prove each layer before adding the next. This mirrors successful product development in commercial software but is even more important in defense, where integration failures in the field are immediately visible and costly.

4. “If it’s not seamless, it won’t survive contact with the warfighter.” Despite the old saying “good enough for government work,” the operational bar for defense products is actually quite amorphous. Byron observed that “a slow or unreliable robot simply gets abandoned.” In other words, your project might die without you even knowing. The product actually has to perform well enough that operators don’t think about it. Only then can you expand the mission set, add payloads, or introduce multi-vehicle coordination.

5. It’s not about your tech. The sooner you embrace this, the faster you’ll win.

   Winning a contract gets you in the door, but a contract isn’t the same thing as winning warfighter trust. Byron draws a clear distinction between them. Overland's next 12 months aren't going to be defined by new contracts as much as they are going to be defined by creating "a permanent presence" with Army and Marine Corps units. I love this point because it suggests a totally different motion. It’s not about closing the deal or renewing it. It’s not about another slide or another meeting. It’s about doing things that don’t scale, having people side by side with the mission owners, and obsessing over the question of how to make your technology invisible inside existing workflows rather than celebrated as a novelty.

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

For more on Overland AI: www.overland.ai

Follow Byron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byron-boots/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

In this episode, Forterra CEO Josh Araujo is joined by Ari Schuler, a returning CTV guest, to take us inside Forterra’s acquisition of goTenna.

Company Overview

About Forterra: Ground autonomy company enabling war fighters to shoot, move, and communicate more effectively. Technical stack includes autonomous driving systems, mission payload integration, and now mesh communications through the goTenna acquisition. Working with military customers across operational theaters. Founded 20+ years ago (as Robotic Research), recently closed Series C while simultaneously acquiring goTenna.

About goTenna: Mesh networking communications company providing interoperable comms, born from Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn. Pivoted from consumer to military/public safety after discovering product-market fit with operators in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the southern border. Technology enables high node-count networks (100+ devices) sending low-bandwidth position/location data, critical for blue force tracking and preventing friendly fire.

About our Guests

About Josh Araujo: CEO of Forterra, building autonomous ground vehicle technology for military operations. Retired Marine, and Jefferies investment banker covering aerospace and defense. Joined Forterra (then Robotic Research) in 2021 as the first non-technical hire, now leading a company with 20+ years of autonomy innovation transitioning to programs of record.

About Ari Schuler: Former CEO of goTenna, now leading the communications division at Forterra. Built goTenna’s pivot from consumer to B2G, deploying mesh networking technology in conflict zones globally. Former DHS official who created Customs and Border Protection (CBP)’s innovation team, bringing government operator perspective to commercial tech development.

Key Takeaways

1. Skip the vitamin, find the medicine.

Ari’s mentor gave him a deceptively simple framework: are you selling something people want (vitamins), or something they can’t live without (medicine)? goTenna started as a consumer product, but product-market fit became unmistakable once the technology hit Afghanistan, Iraq, and the southern border. Ari explains that when you found the true medicinal use case, you go all in. Straddling consumer and government markets wastes capital and credibility that companies don’t have to spare.

2. The ability to sustain operations in the field is the real moat.

Both Forterra and goTenna had extraordinary technical pedigrees: Forterra’s co-founder holds 100+ patents, and goTenna’s mesh protocols are proprietary and deeply differentiated. But Josh was explicit: deploying at scale into combat environments is “miles apart” from having a cool demo. The muscle required to do customer success, field maintenance, and operational support in places like Afghanistan or Ukraine is not taught in any graduate program.

3. In M&A, cultural alignment is what ultimately determines deal success or failure.

The core of the conversation centers on how Josh turned a term sheet around in 72 hours, from a Friday morning coffee between Ari and Scott Sanders (another CTV alum), to an afternoon board meeting, to a signed term sheet by Sunday night. This kind of speed is not only a function of high caliber financial modeling and expertise, but of a clear strategic rationale and cultural fit. Josh talked about his view that even the best business alignment in the world can’t overcome a cultural mismatch. Culture doesn’t mean squishy values in this case. It refers to the companies’ shared mission focus, values, and tech stack (NetSuite, Arena, JIRA).

4. The defense VC funding model is creating a structural problem for which consolidation is the only solution.

Josh flagged a concern that most defense tech founders are quietly aware of: many of the best companies in this space have great technology, great teams, and genuine product-market fit, but lack venture-scale TAMs. VC math requires one in a hundred to go 100x. At the risk of sounding trite, that calculus alone will not support the entire ecosystem of mission-critical hardware businesses. As a result, if venture is the primary tool, companies that shouldn’t fail will fail because of capital structure problems. This is why Josh is shaping Forterra into a leading consolidator to create a home for these companies.

5. In a post-merger integration, the first priority is “do not break what’s working for the customer.”

Too many post-merger integration efforts try to move fast, combine everything, and extract synergies. In this deal, Josh and Forterra explicitly rejected this. The approach has been phased and deliberate: first, validate the technology combination (goTenna’s X2m module was physically integrated into Forterra’s Vector platform within 30 days, achieving 25x the range of the previous radio). Second, resource the acquired team to execute on their existing pipeline. Third, after the teams have developed organic trust, start to combine go-to-market and engineering functions. This cadence matters because defense vendors cannot afford to push artificial disruptions on their customers. As Ari explains, “We can figure out the HR systems. What we can’t do is mess up operational deployments.” The customer relationship is paramount.

For more:

• Website: Forterra | goTenna

• LinkedIn: Forterra | goTenna

• Follow Josh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-araujo/

• Follow Ari: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ari-schuler-1ab93239/

• Follow Crossing the Valley: https://www.linkedin.com/company/102082197/

Dino Mavrookas is the CEO and co-founder of Saronic. He served 11 years in the U.S. Navy SEALs (2004–2015), with his final five years on SEAL Team Six. After leaving the military, he transitioned to private equity at Vista Equity Partners, where he spent roughly five years before the pull of mission-driven work drew him back to defense. Dino describes his transition as a gradual realization, like being a “frog in boiling water,” that he wanted to dedicate his career to building solutions that protect the country. He founded Saronic in September 2022 with backing from 8VC and a slew of other high profile investors.

About Saronic

Saronic is a maritime autonomy and shipbuilding company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in September 2022, the company designs, builds, and deploys autonomous surface vessels for the U.S. Navy and allied forces. In just over three years, Saronic has grown to approximately 1,000 employees across six U.S. locations and two international offices (Australia and UK). The company’s flagship products are Corsair, a 24-foot autonomous speedboat built at their 500,000 sq. ft. Austin facility (capacity: 2,000+ units/year), and Marauder, a 180-foot autonomous ship being built at their shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana. Saronic secured a $392 million contract with the U.S. Navy in late 2025, with the Secretary of the Navy publicly endorsing their approach as the model for future procurement. The company has announced Port Alpha, a $5B+ initiative to build the world’s largest and most advanced shipyard, with the goal of producing 10 million gross tons annually. This would effectively 100x current U.S. shipbuilding capacity.

Key Takeaways

1. Strong conviction is the best way to get lucky

Saronic filed its incorporation six weeks before the first USV strike in Ukraine. Even before this catalytic event validated the market, Dino had a deep, coherent thesis around the market. He had conducted extensive customer discovery at the micro-level, and intricate market analysis of the shipbuilding gap with China (230x capacity advantage). The story shows that while none of us can control the timing of the market, you can develop a strong point of view, that positions you to ride the wave when it arrives. For Dino, the primary question was simply when the government would start putting dollars behind shipbuilding.

2. Understand what business you’re in on Day 1

Saronic’s head of manufacturing, recruited from SpaceX, was their third employee. Dino hired him before they even built a prototype of their boat. This came from a conviction that “if you’re not thinking about manufacturing during the prototype phase, whatever you built is only guaranteed not to scale.” Recognizing the nature of the shipbuilding problem meant recognizing that production was the primary challenge to solve, even before design. That’s why today their product lines have 80% hardware consistency across boat platforms, modular ship designs with roughly seven core components, and a vertically integrated supply chain with zero Chinese components.

3. Demonstration is far more powerful than proposal, when operating ahead of demand

Saronic’s business model inverts the traditional defense procurement approach. Saronic invests its own capital to build products it has conviction in, then demonstrates working capability when the requirement materializes. Their $392M Navy contract is the result of a ready-to-build product delivered on an existing production line. The Secretary of the Navy called this “the model for how the Navy wants to do business.”

4. Software and autonomy are the unlock for competing with China on cost

China’s shipbuilding dominance (972 commercial ships vs. fewer than 10 for the U.S. in 2023) stems from lower labor costs, lower material costs, and economies of scale. Saronic’s answer is to redesign ships to give us a chance to compete. By removing humans from the vessel, you can strip out massive complexity: no crew quarters, simplified systems, modular construction. Saronic’s autonomous ships have roughly seven components. This lowers labor requirements, reduces material costs, and enables economies of scale through standardized production. Dino believes that this approach will make U.S.-built ships economically competitive on the global market for the first time in decades.

5. Commercial shipbuilding is a national security strategy, not a diversification play

Saronic’s Port Alpha initiative ($5B+ to build the world’s most advanced shipyard) is about creating wartime production capacity during peacetime. The Navy needs surge capacity for conflict scenarios, but it’s hard for any company to simply maintain idle shipyards. So, by filling peacetime capacity with commercial shipbuilding, a company like Saronic can offer a strategic reserve of capacity, which can be converted to defense production if needed. That excess capacity produced America’s World War II advantage. But it will only work this time if U.S. ships can compete economically. Hence, the focus on software and automation.

Saronic is certainly one of the most well-capitalized players in defense, and will be a name we circle back to in the months and years ahead.

For now, for more on Saronic:

• Website: saronic.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/saronic-technologies/

• Follow Dino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dino-mavrookas-190244127/

• For Careers: https://jobs.lever.co/saronic

For more Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

About our Guests

David Barboza is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wirescreen. Before founding the company, David spent over two decades as a journalist at The New York Times, where he served as Shanghai bureau chief for 12 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on the hidden wealth of Chinese political elites. A history major by training, David’s career was defined by painstaking, multi-year investigations that required connecting vast networks of corporate records, government documents, and financial data across borders. He also co-founded The Wire China, an independent publication covering the U.S.-China relationship.

Bradley Martinez is the Head of Go-to-Market at Wirescreen. Bradley’s career has centered on using data and analytics to drive risk-based and opportunistic decisions, primarily in financial services. Before joining Wirescreen (shortly after the company’s Series A), Bradley held roles at FactSet and other data-driven firms. At Wirescreen, he has overseen the company’s pivot from a financial services focus to a government-first go-to-market strategy, building the partner networks and sales infrastructure needed to scale in the federal market.

About Wirescreen

Wirescreen is a Sequoia-backed intelligence platform that maps Chinese business networks and their global connections for the U.S. government, defense contractors, and the broader national security community. The platform aggregates millions of Chinese corporate records (including ownership structures, investment flows, patent filings, supply chain relationships), translates them into English, and connects them to reveal hidden relationships between commercial entities and state/military actors. Originally conceived as a business intelligence tool for financial services, Wirescreen found its strongest product-market fit serving government agencies dealing with the complexities of great power competition. Use cases span export controls, IP theft investigations, CFIUS reviews, fentanyl precursor tracking, university research security, critical minerals mapping, and defense supply chain vetting. The company also operates The Wire China, a journalism division that both generates revenue and serves as a data quality feedback loop for the platform.

Key Takeaways

1. Build something people want (and sometimes “people” means YOU)

David Barboza set out to build a better tool for investigative journalism. After years of spending exceptional amounts of time on single investigations, manually stitching together documents scattered across filing cabinets and digital folders, he developed conviction that technology could help. He first tried to build a platform that could connect historical archives to new data from inside The New York Times, spending two years prototyping the concept with his co-founder Lynn. While the Times loved the investigations it produced, the company lacked the infrastructure or appetite to build and sustain a technology platform. So when his editor suggested a leave of absence, David took the leap. Like countless before him, he couldn’t resist the pull of building something he deeply wanted to use.

2. Demand signals, rather than a business plan, determine the market

Wirescreen’s original go-to-market strategy targeted Wall Street: investment banks, KYC compliance, due diligence firms. That’s where Bradley’s expertise lay and where the buyers of Chinese corporate data seemed to congregate. But the market had other ideas. A defense contractor discovered Wirescreen through The Wire China news magazine, and asked the company to license its data. Government agencies started reaching out, asking David to come to Washington for meetings. Meanwhile, as Bradley monitored GTM experiments running in financial services, they paled in comparison to the traction the team was gaining in government. Financial services showed interest but required multi-year procurement crawls through institutional onboarding processes. The government’s urgency offered a faster path to revenue. Turns out the government can move fast, when the urgency is high enough.

3. Direct user access is the most valuable asset

Even though many government deals ultimately flow through contractors or complex procurement vehicles, the conversations that mattered most for Wirescreen happened directly with the analysts, policymakers, and mission owners who would actually use their product. These conversations did two things: they validated whether the product solved their problem, and they generated the demand signals that shaped the company’s roadmap. When Wirescreen heard the same need from three or four different agencies, they knew it was time to invest engineering resources. Bradley also emphasizes the importance of building a generous partner network. This network allowed them to access people in the ecosystem willing to answer basic questions about government procurement mechanics (periods of performance, color of money, DFAR compliance).

4. An evolving threat landscape meant an evolving addressable market

One of the themes that kept coming up in this conversation was the genuine surprise the team felt as the ground shifted beneath their feet. Both David and Bradley repeatedly describe discovering use cases they never anticipated. They started with a hypothesis about defense industrial base supply chain vetting and export controls. But as they engaged more deeply with agencies, they uncovered demand from every direction: fentanyl precursor tracking, university research security, CFIUS investment reviews, critical minerals dependency mapping, cyber threat analysis, and more. Every time they thought they understood the scope of government need, it turned out to be bigger than they imagined. The reality is that competition with China touches nearly every facet of government operations, from defense to economic security, law enforcement, trade policy, higher education, and civil society. The key has been staying focused on the slice of the problem that Wirescreen solves, even as more potential partners as for more things.

5. Unconventional founder backgrounds can be a decisive competitive advantage

We don’t talk to too many journalist-founders on show. But David’s 20+ years as an investigative journalist gave him almost every skill needed to build a defense intelligence company. He honed the ability to connect disparate data points into a coherent narrative. He was comfortable operating in ambiguous, information-poor environments. He was willing to spend years pursuing an uncertain outcome (most of his investigations failed). He had experience doing the exact activity that his users were now discovering (archiving and organizing massive volumes of primary source material). And perhaps most importantly, he had deep domain expertise in Chinese corporate networks from 12 years of on-the-ground reporting in Shanghai. That outpaced virtually every government agency he sought to work with. As a result, David was uniquely situated to identify the gap he found.

For more on Wirescreen: https://wirescreen.ai/

Follow David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-barboza-7bba4325

Follow Bradley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleymartinez/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Subscribe to Crossing the Valley: youtube.com/@CrossingtheValley

About Our Guests

AJ Piplica is the CEO and co-founder of Hermeus, a defense technology company developing hypersonic aircraft powered by air-breathing engines. His technical background centers on aerodynamics and hypersonics, with early career work on rocket engines and re-entry systems. Unlike many defense tech founders who come from software or commercial tech, AJ’s obsession with speed and aviation started in childhood and led him down the space track in college before gravitating toward the aviation side of hypersonics. He chose this path specifically because he wanted to push boundaries rather than spend a career optimizing incremental performance improvements on existing turbine technology.

Zach Shore was recently promoted from Chief Revenue Officer to President of Hermeus. After beginning his career as a Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, Zach served in a variety of industry roles, including as a consultant at Deloitte, Sr Director of Business Development for JAD C2 at Anduril, and Vice President of Product at Vertafore before joining Hermeus in 2022.

About Hermeus

Hermeus builds hypersonic aircraft designed to operate in what AJ calls “the final frontier of aviation.” The company focuses on air-breathing, reusable systems rather than expendable rockets or boost-glide vehicles. Their approach mirrors the commercial space industry’s transformation of launch: prove you can iterate rapidly on full-scale hardware by treating vehicle loss as an acceptable cost of learning when no crew is involved. Hermeus has won Other Transaction Authority (OTA) awards like Chimera and Antares, where the government pays for data and milestone achievements rather than traditional cost-plus development contracts. The company is building 30,000-60,000 pound aircraft, which requires substantial upfront capital and a production-first mindset from day one.

Key Takeaways

1. Separate mission assurance from safety to unlock hardware iteration

The most critical insight from the commercial space revolution applies directly to hypersonics: hardware risk and human safety risk are fundamentally different categories. Traditional aerospace culture treats hardware loss with nearly the same level of concern as human casualties, creating a risk-averse engineering environment that prevents the kind of rapid iteration required to advance into new flight regimes. The regulatory frameworks inherited from crewed aviation assume that preventing crashes is paramount, but autonomous vehicles enable a different approach where controlled crash scenarios become acceptable learning opportunities. This shift in mindset allowed SpaceX to iterate at full vehicle scale, and Hermeus is applying the same principle to air-breathing hypersonics.

2. Build products for operators from day one, not technology looking for a mission

The traditional research lab model follows a sequential path: develop interesting technology, demonstrate it works, then attempt to transition it to an operational program. This approach has a poor track record because it separates technology development from real operational requirements. Hermeus inverts this by starting with the operator and ensuring every development decision solves an actual warfighter problem that delivers substantial value. This explains why product companies often struggle to work with organizations like the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which see themselves as architects who design capabilities and expect contractors to build to spec. When you show up with your own product vision, there’s inherent friction with a “not built here” culture.

3. Concentration of capital beats diversification for hard tech at scale

The Defense Innovation Unit’s hedge strategy tapped into a fundamental reality of complex hardware systems: you cannot prototype your way to a 60,000 pound aircraft on Small Business Innovation Research funding. The temptation in government innovation programs is to spread risk by funding many small bets, but this approach fails for systems that require immense upfront investment to de-risk both technology and production scalability. While giving 25 companies $5 million each might work for low cost attritable systems, in capital intensive hard tech the Hermeus team would prefer to see the government fund five companies with $25 million and pick some winners. This requires clear accountability and transition pathways, but it enables companies to actually build hardware that can reach production scale.

4. OTA structures unlock speed by paying for outcomes instead of activities

Hermeus had success with awards structured as Other Transaction Authority contracts because they changed what the government was buying. Rather than paying for development activities and managing the technical approach, OTA programs pay for data generated along the way and for milestone achievements that deliver specific capabilities. This shifts the focus from process compliance to outcome delivery. For a company like Hermeus, this means the government isn’t dictating how to develop the aircraft or micromanaging spending decisions. Instead, they define what capability they need, and the company has the flexibility to build the infrastructure and processes required to deliver it efficiently.

Summary

Counterintuitively, the hypersonics race may not be about who has the most PhD researchers or the biggest simulation clusters. The Hermeus team suggests it will come down to who is willing to take hardware risk at full scale, iterate based on flight test data, and build products that solve real operational problems from day one. Hermeus represents a new generation of defense companies that learned from commercial space: embrace hardware iteration, separate mission assurance from safety, focus on operators instead of technology for its own sake, pursue concentrated capital rather than diffuse funding, and hold yourself publicly accountable through concrete metrics.

For more: hermeus.com

Follow AJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajpiplica/

Follow Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyshore/

Subscribe to Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

Ian Cinnamon is the co-founder and CEO of Apex Space, which he launched to solve a fundamental bottleneck in the space industry: the lack of available, high-quality satellite platforms. Prior to Apex, Ian worked in aerospace engineering and identified the satellite bus as a critical constraint for the growing commercial and defense space ecosystem.

About Apex Space

Apex Space is a merchant supplier of satellite platforms (buses), building standardized, high-volume spacecraft that customers can purchase off-the-shelf and customize for their missions. The company has raised over $400M across its Series C and D rounds from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Shield Capital, and Interlagos. Apex differentiates itself through production speed, vertical integration, and a focus on unit economics. Surprisingly, they make money on every bus they sell. By mid-2026, the company expects to have approximately six satellites on orbit across various customer missions.

Key Updates (One Year Later)

1. DOGE Resilience: At the start of 2025, DOGE caused significant turbulence, cutting programs, shifting priorities, and forcing sales leaders to rebuild pipelines. Apex learned to “bend with the wind” rather than rigidly pursuing predetermined opportunities. Today, the company’s opportunity set is 10x larger than a year ago, but composed of entirely different programs than originally anticipated.

2. Raising Capital on Their Terms: Apex closed two major rounds in 2025, a $200M Series C and a $200M Series D. The Series D came unsolicited from Interlagos, who saw Apex’s execution and customer traction and pushed to invest even when the company wasn’t actively fundraising.

3. Vertical Integration as Strategic Imperative: As Apex scaled, external suppliers couldn’t keep pace. So they’ve brought almost everything in-house. By mid-2026, 70% of Apex’s subsystems will have in-space heritage. By year-end, the target is full vertical integration. This required significant capital investment but ensures supply chain resilience as production scales.

4. Betting Ahead of Demand: Apex announced Project Shadow, a self-funded ($15M) space-based interceptor technology maturation program. They are positioning for massive opportunities even before demand.

5. Building for the Bubble: Ian believes defense tech and space are in a bubble that will eventually pop. So his goal is to ensure Apex never needs another dollar of outside capital to survive. The company is profitable on every satellite bus it sells. This operational discipline means Apex can weather a market correction while competitors dependent on continuous fundraising may struggle.

Learn more: apexspace.com

Subscribe to Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Ben Van Roo is the CEO and Founder of Legion Intelligence. He comes from a military family (his brother is currently on active duty), giving him both personal connection to and deep understanding of the defense community’s needs. His career encompasses a combination of academic rigor and operational execution:

• PhD in Operations Research with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison

• RAND Corporation: Spent formative years working on military logistics problems, traveling to Air Force installations across Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq

• Chegg: Joined as an executive pre-IPO, running machine learning, data science, and supply chain infrastructure. Experienced the discipline of public company accountability firsthand

• Primer AI: Joined at Series A, founded and led the national security division

Ben founded Legion (formerly, Yurts) in 2022, before ChatGPT had even launched.

ABOUT LEGION INTELLIGENCE

Legion Intelligence is an applied AI company that connects AI capabilities to the actual workflows, processes, and legacy applications used across the Department of Defense.

The Core Problem: AI models have gotten remarkably good, but they remain disconnected from how work actually gets done.

The Legion Product: Legion builds the infrastructure that makes any workflow, across any environment, AI-enabled. The company’s offerings runs on edge, cloud, or hybrid environments; connect to legacy applications without requiring expensive system integrator rebuilds; and are model-agnostic (e.g., work with open source, proprietary, and government models). Ben also says they are the first to deploy an agentic workflow platform in IL5 and IL6 classified environments.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The Plumbing Problem Is the Real Problem

When Ben was at Primer in 2017, he watched open source models become “terrifyingly good.” But nobody was actually using them across their workflows. He realized it wasn’t as much about the model as it was about connecting AI to the six or seven systems people actually touch to get work done.

2. Find Champions Who See the Future

General Fenton at SOCOM was “light years ahead of everyone, including venture capitalists” in understanding enterprise AI. He wanted to bring AI across the enterprise before ChatGPT made it obvious. Legion secured their initial IDIQ contract because one visionary leader saw where things were going.

3. Get Technology Into Users’ Hands Immediately

The most important lesson Ben took from Primer was that feedback cycles are everything. At Legion, the philosophy became: “Any exercise, any event, anything where we can go—we’re going to be there.” Bring your own hardware, do all the work to get there, and prove it works.

4. Make Early Technical Bets That Seem Confusing

Legion was first to deploy GenAI on small form factors for national security. First on-prem. First on IL5. First on IL6. These investments seemed odd at the time, when others were just focused on the cloud. But they created defensible positioning as the market evolved.

For more on Legion: legionintel.com

Follow Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanroo/

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Subscribe to Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

Ben is the Chief Business Officer at Ursa Major, bringing over 22 years of government service to the defense tech startup. His career includes 10 years in the Coast Guard, legislative experience as a congressional staffer on appropriations, and corporate leadership at defense giants L3 and Honeywell.

At age 50, Nicholson made an unexpected leap from the established defense industrial base to a venture-backed startup, driven by a desire to give back and the realization that his experience and perspective could help bridge the gap between young engineering talent and the realities of defense procurement.

A self-described “constitutional geek” who signs half his emails simply “America,” Ben brings an unusual combination of technical credibility, government insight, and entrepreneurial drive to URSA Major’s mission.

About Ursa Major

Founded 11 years ago during the space launch “gold rush,” Ursa Major pivoted to focus squarely on defense propulsion, addressing what they see as the long pole in the tent for anything that moves fast in the battlespace.

The company is focused on three key mission areas:

• Homeland Defense: Hypersonic propulsion systems

• Munitions: Solid rocket motors

• Space Mobility: Propulsion for orbital applications

The Business Model: URSA Major is a products and systems company, not a services shop. They’ve received $250 million of private capital (including a recent $100 million Series E), opened a 400-acre test facility in Northeast Colorado, and can go from clean sheet design to hot fire in 29 days.

The Core Innovation: Ursa Major combines additive (3D printing) and agile manufacturing to achieve rapid iteration while building toward scale. Their philosophy is to use printing to lock designs fast and avoid costly mistakes before committing capital to production tooling.

Key Takeaways

1. The Complexity Multiplier Is Real, But So Is the Opportunity

Ben’s framework here captures the challenge of defense tech: “Design is pretty easy. It’s 10 times harder to get the prototype. Then it’s 10 times harder to scale. And it’s 10 times harder to scale with a profitable business.”

That said, hard things and big things often require the same effort as small things. If you’re going to put in the work, you might as well tackle problems that matter.

2. 3D Printing is for Design Lock, Not Mass Production

The hype around additive manufacturing promised it would revolutionize everything. The reality is it’s really good at a subset of things. At Ursa Major, 3D printing serves a specific purpose: rapid iteration to lock designs.

But when you need thousands of solid rocket motors? “You’re not going to print thousands. That’s just not what 3D printing is about.” The value is in saving time on the front end and building confidence in designs before committing capital to production tooling.

3. Trust is Earned Through Tedious Repetition

“Everybody wants to win,” Ben told me. “But are they willing to do what it takes to win? And sometimes that’s the tedious, repetitive things to earn that trust.”

The sexy part of Ursa’s business is the kinetics. But the reason they’ve been successful is they’ve earned trust by doing the tedious things. That’s why the company hired the former head of safety from the Navy and Marine Corps. They focus on DCMA audits and prime partner reviews. You cannot skip over compliance just to focus on the sexy stuff.

4. The Government is Finally Asking Industry to Challenge the Status Quo

Ben told us about a recent Navy program where the government is explicitly telling vendors: “Do not do things the status quo way.” As the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (DON RCO) hits the road on their tour this week, we are hearing more and more that legacy approaches to manufacturing are a significant driver of complexity that frustrates modernization.

“I can’t think of a time where government [has] really challenged industry this way,” Ben said. That’s the same paradigm shift that’s creating space to innovate on solid rocket motors, which have been made the same way for more than a generation.

5. Production Signals Matter More Than Cash Alone

This is a common refrain, but it’s worth repeating: there’s a common misconception that defense tech companies just need more capital.

But the ones who scale do so on the back of two forces working together: cash (to accelerate) and production-level contracts (to de-risk investment). When the government indicates they’ll buy at scale if the technology works, private capital follows. “I’m ready to pounce with a little bit of clarity,” Nicholson said. “I think we can answer the call.”

Ben’s Call for Startups

For startups looking to support the defense industrial base, Nicholson offered two focus areas:

1. Data Analytics and AI: “Either you’re going to be good at it, you’re going to be competing against it, you’ve got to be conversing in it.”

2. Advanced Manufacturing Expertise: Following the SpaceX playbook of bringing experts from automotive and other high-volume industries to solve scale challenges.

Check out the Website: https://ursamajor.com/

Follow Ursa Major: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ursamajortech/

Follow Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-nicholson-666257205

Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/

Subscribe to Crossing the Valley: www.youtube.com/@CrossingTheValley

ABOUT TROY DEMMER

Troy is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gecko Robotics. He started the company 12+ years ago as a college senior project at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, alongside co-founder Jake Loosararian. Troy came from a medical background and saw an opportunity to bring diagnostic thinking to industrial infrastructure. He personally led Gecko’s expansion into defense starting four years ago, and the company now manufactures robots in Pittsburgh while deploying them across power plants, refineries, naval vessels, and nuclear facilities.

ABOUT GECKO ROBOTICS

Gecko Robotics builds AI-powered climbing robots that inspect and assess the structural health of critical infrastructure. The company started by serving commercial clients — power plants, refineries, and manufacturing facilities — before expanding into defense. Today, their technology inspects ICBM silos, destroyers, submarines (including SSNs and SSBNs), and is moving into new construction for Columbia-class submarines and naval reactors. Sam Altman wrote their first check during their YC batch, and the company turned down an early acquisition offer from an OEM. Gecko manufactures in Pittsburgh, PA and emphasizes keeping robots “employed” rather than sitting unused.

TIMESTAMPS

[1:10] Origin story: The power plant problem that started it all

[2:35] How a college alumni connection led to Gecko’s first customer

[4:00] “You can’t build this in a lab”

[4:48] Two years in one boiler: Jake’s journey building the first robot

[6:33] Forward deployed engineering and the Palantir inspiration

[8:02] Finding product-market fit: The YC experience and Sam Altman’s first check

[10:00] “Hiding in plain sight”

[11:47] Transition to defense: From power plants to national security

[13:05] AFWERX and SBIR: Building the foundation for defense work

[14:24] What translated from commercial and what required rethinking

[16:21] Working with OEMs: Reverse scanning and the first acquisition offer

[18:35] First defense asset: The path to inspecting ICBM silos

[20:09] Inside the room: Getting robots certified for nuclear environments

[21:33] Current state: Scaling across destroyers, submarines, and new construction

[25:37] Business model: Robots as capability vs. permanent fixtures

[27:00] Manufacturing in Pittsburgh and scaling production

[28:07] “95% of robots are unemployed”

[29:35] Advice for startups: Think integration from day one

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Access to the Problem Is the Unfair Advantage

Gecko’s origin story embodies the ethos of building with not for a customer. A power plant operator came to their college with a specific problem: 70% asset uptime and constant unplanned downtime. He offered access to his facility. Co-founder Jake spent two years inside a single boiler refining the first robot. Troy is emphatic: “I don’t think you could build a technology like this in a lab. That was the unfair advantage — just access to the problem.”

2. Using SBIRs to Build Infrastructure

When Gecko decided to pursue defense, they started with AFWERX and SBIR programs — Phase 1, and a number of Phase 2 contracts. Beyond the funding, the value was in building what Troy calls “the semblance of a defense company”: registrations, certifications, procurement knowledge, and the operational credibility needed to scale. Jake and Troy recognizing Small Business Innovation Research for what it was: scaffolding for the larger business they wanted to build.

3. Target O&M Budgets to Bypass Procurement Timelines

Gecko made a strategic decision to enter defense through operations and maintenance cycles rather than new procurement. The reasoning was practical: O&M money already exists and can be spent in-year. “If we had a capability that could be used today to improve an O&M cycle, great. We can buy that in year. We don’t have to set up this longer cycle.” This let them demonstrate value quickly, build relationships, and expand scope from a single destroyer to entire platform classes.

4. Start at Forward Bases Where Urgency Is Higher

Gecko’s first naval deployment wasn’t at a major domestic shipyard — it was at SRF Japan, a forward-deployed repair facility. Troy’s logic: “You’ve got a little less capability at a forward base. The urgency to get things done with creativity and innovation might be a little bit higher than your mother shipyards here back at home.”

5. Design for Integration, Not Just Capability

Troy’s parting advice cuts to the core of why many defense tech companies struggle to scale: “In order to deploy technologies here, it’s not just pushing code. You’ve got to meet the physical realm where it’s at. If it doesn’t work for the people on the ground, if it doesn’t make their lives easier, you’re gonna get organ rejection.” Gecko succeeded because they thought about tech insertion from day one.

FOR MORE:

About Gecko: https://www.geckorobotics.com

About Troy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-demmer-27037526

Crossing the Valley: youtube.com/@crossingthevalley

Dan Smoot is the CEO of Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence. He comes from a background in high-tech companies and has led major business transformations before. Since taking the helm, Dan has overseen the company’s transition from a publicly traded satellite imaging business to a private, solutions-focused company. He led the controversial decision to retire the Maxar brand — one of the most recognized names in commercial space — in favor of the new Vantor identity. Under his leadership, the company has launched six satellites, dramatically increase recurring revenue, and is expanding aggressively into international markets.

ABOUT VANTOR

Vantor (formerly Maxar Intelligence) is one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imagery and geospatial solutions providers. The company operates a constellation of satellites delivering 30-centimeter resolution imagery — the highest commercially available. After being taken private by Advent International and BCI, Vantor sold its manufacturing division and completely transformed its business model from transactional imaging sales to subscription-based solutions. The company’s products include maritime awareness, site monitoring, GPS-denied navigation, and 3D mapping. Vantor claims to be one of only two companies (alongside Google) with global 3D mapping at scale, and serves customers across defense, intelligence, and commercial markets worldwide.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Sometimes You Have to Kill the Brand to Transform the Business

Maxar was one of the most recognized names in defense tech, synonymous with exquisite satellite imagery. But that brand equity became a liability. Customers saw “imaging company” and couldn’t see the new capabilities: AI-powered analytics, maritime awareness, GPS-denied navigation, and 3D solutions. The rebrand to Vantor was strategic: “You have to reorient the eyes of the customer to make sure they understand there’s broader modernization happening.” Add the complexity of Maxar Space being sold to Intuitive Machines, and leadership felt keeping the old name would only have created more confusion.

2. Going Private Creates Air Cover for Transformation

Vantor’s transition from transactional sales to 90% recurring revenue didn’t happen under public market pressure. When Advent International took Maxar private, it gave leadership something rare: time and permission to rebuild the business model. Dan is candid about this: “When you go private, you can actually take the time to reformat the business. Getting the sales motion, getting your customers to buy in a different way is not easy.” Today, the company boasts some of that predictability that public markets reward.

3. Acquisition Reform Opens Doors for Commercial Solutions

The recent push for acquisition reform means the government is looking to buy software and modern capabilities differently. Vantor has aligned its business model directly to this shift. Subscription-based solutions fit how the government now wants to buy: modern, updateable, and not locked into elongated contracts.

4. Allied “Sovereignty Panic” Is a Massive Growth Driver

With the US stepping back from certain international commitments, allied nations are suddenly realizing they lack organic intelligence capabilities. They’ve been dependent on American systems for decades. Now they’re scrambling. Dan sees this as Vantor’s biggest growth opportunity: “They’ve gotten ‘wow, we don’t really have our own capabilities.’ You can only build that through commercial. It’s almost impossible to have the funding and time to do it bespoke.” This is true across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond.

5. Geospatial AI Is a Different Problem Than Language AI

Dan’s call for startups challenges the current AI hype: “Start thinking about the spatial side, not necessarily the language side. The mathematics is very different. We’ve kind of solved language with things like ChatGPT. Spatial recognition of change on the ground is a whole different way of thinking about data.”

TIMESTAMPS

[1:19] What brought Dan to RNDF and key takeaways from the day
[2:15] Acquisition reform and how it impacts Vantor's strategy
[3:24] Why Maxar Intelligence became Vantor
[5:42] The role of financial markets
[6:28] Breaking down Vantor's core products and capabilities
[8:08] Driving automation in geospatial intelligence
[8:42] The decision to be more public with capabilities on social media
[10:18] GPS-denied navigation: supporting drones in Ukraine
[10:43] The China satellite photo showdown
[11:43] Non-earth imaging and space domain awareness
[12:05] Current phase of business
[13:36] International expansion and allied sovereignty needs
[14:00] Transitioning to 90% ARR
[15:40] Going private
[17:31] 3D mapping
[19:48] Commercial applications
[21:32] Managing petabytes of data
[24:03] Dan's call for startups

Learn more: vantor.com
Follow Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielsmoot/
For more Crossing the Valley: youtube.com/@CrossingTheValley

About Nick LaRovere

Nick is the CEO and Co-founder of Pryzm. As a software engineer at Palantir Technologies, Nick worked on both Gotham and Foundry platforms, gaining firsthand exposure to building federal contracting systems and understanding the critical intersection of technology and national security missions.

A graduate of Colby College, Nick’s experience selling Palantir’s solutions to DOD and three-letter agencies provided him with intimate knowledge of the procurement pain points that would eventually inspire Pryzm’s founding mission.

Nick is part of a core founding team of four Colby College grads, each of whom experienced the pain of government acquisition: Matt Hawkins (president & COO), Justin Deckert (chief growth officer), and David Istrati (chief technology officer).

About Pryzm

Pryzm emerged from a deceptively simple observation: government procurement was drowning in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. What started as a document processing solution has evolved into a comprehensive capture and relationship mapping platform that serves the entire defense contracting ecosystem.

The product’s core function is transforming traditional capture processes through intelligent automation and visualization. Their “Orion constellations” feature allows users to map influence networks, parse opportunities, and understand organizational relationships in ways that replace traditional whiteboards and Figma diagrams with dynamic, data-driven insights.

Pryzm serves both commercial defense contractors seeking to win government business and government agencies looking to improve their procurement processes. This dual-market approach creates network effects that strengthen the platform’s value proposition for all users. Their recent Seed funding ($12M+ led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism team) puts them on an accelerated path across both commercial and federal segments.

Key Takeaways

1. Solve Your Own Problem First: Pryzm’s founding story illustrates the power of building solutions to problems you’ve personally experienced. Pryzm built OCR and document processing capabilities first, then layered capture tools on top. This technical foundation allowed them to create “Orion constellations” - a specific solution for mapping influence networks that replaces traditional relationship tracking methods. These deep technical capabilities in their domain today serve as Pryzm’s competitive moat.

2. Marry the Pain, not the Product: The company’s evolution from document processing to capture tooling demonstrates the importance of remaining flexible as you discover where your technology creates the most value. When they realized their relationship mapping and opportunity parsing capabilities were more valuable than their original PDF extraction tool, they pivoted their business model toward the higher-value solution.

3. Timing is Everything: As Nick noted, “There is so much tailwind for acquisition reform right now.” Whether they knew that acquisition reform was coming when they started the company, or they hit timing gold, the reality is the current a bipartisan push for procurement modernization is the greatest gift in the fight against institutional inertia.

4. Tune out the Market Noise: Nick acknowledges the danger of getting distracted by “fads” and “shallow solutions” in the rapidly growing defense tech space. Their strategy of staying “squarely focused on the customer” and “the mission” rather than following trends has allowed them to build genuine value rather than chase market hype.

5. Treat compliance partners as force multipliers, not just vendors: Nick specifically called out SecondFront and Palantir FedStart as “excellent partners” rather than just service providers. There’s huge value in developing compliance and ATO partners who can accelerate your speed to market, and who can help build additional customer pipeline along the way.

Learn more about Pryzm: https://pryzm.io/

Follow Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaslarovere/

Follow Noah: LinkedIn | X

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

This week, we are spotlighting a new podcast in the defense community, Rebuilding the Fleet.

This new pod covers all things Maritime Autonomy and shipbuilding, featuring repeat guest Austin Gray.

This episode is a discussion between Austin and HII’s Executive Vice President Eric Chewning, a former investment banker, management consultant at McKinsey, and senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense.

All part of our efforts to promote solid content from the next generation of defense disruptors. Have a listen and if you enjoy, we encourage you to follow along and subscribe.

Key Topics of Conversation

• Workforce Innovation and Outsourcing Strategy: HII’s ambitious plan to scale outsourced work from 2 million to 3 million hours annually, and rebuilding of the sub-tier industrial base across America

• Unmanned Systems Leadership: HII’s position as the world’s largest UUV producer, the evolution of the Lionfish program and autonomous launch and recovery capabilities for the Remus vehicle family

• Industrial Base and International Partnerships: Analysis of the Korea-Hyundai partnership and how to balance domestic production with international cooperation

• Technology Integration Challenges: assessing the state of AI implementation in legacy manufacturing environments and change management challenges in traditional shipbuilding operations

• Workforce Development Excellence: HII’s Apprentice School programs and strategies for attracting talent from other industries to maritime

• Defense Policy and Budget Outlook: FY26 defense program priorities, evolution of Navy unmanned surface vessel (USV) strategy, and long-term implications for naval force structure and capabilities

Subscribe to Rebuilding the Fleet:

• Apple:

• Spotify:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RebuildingTheFleet

This week is our final installment in the MCON Gameday series. Thanks again to Waco Hoover for inviting us to such a unique event, to everyone who sat down with us, and to you all for tuning in to hear their stories.

This week we meet another remarkable lineup. We spoke with:

• A modern day superhero who plays himself on screen and online

• An entrepreneur helping vets heal through the power of the outdoors

• A multi-faceted entrepreneur helping commercial and nonprofit organizations reach their potential through the power of brand and story

• Two dedicated mental health advocates fighting to end suicide with a simple set of questions

• A true believer in education and the right of every American to lift themselves up

Thanks for taking the time to check this out - enjoy!

Rudy Reyes (Actor, Entrepreneur): At 17, Rudy Reyes emancipated himself and took custody of his two younger brothers, after which he moved to Kansas City, Missouri. There, he continued to study and teach kung fu with his brothers. In 1998, Reyes joined the United States Marine Corps. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was a team leader within the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. As an actor, Rudy has played himself in Generation Kill (2008) and the TV series Apocalypse Man, Ultimate Survival Alaska, and Spartan Race. He is also one of the interviewees of the 2020 documentary series Once Upon a Time in Iraq; and in 2022, he became the lead instructor on SAS: Who Dares Wins. He also portrays the playable character “Enzo Reyes” in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II multiplayer.

Ryan del Grosso (IMPCT Group): After graduating from the US Air Force Academy, Ryan progressed through key leadership roles within Special Tactics, SOCOM’s tactical air-ground integration force and the Air Force’s premier special operations ground force. After leaving the service, he advised the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee, led Brand Purpose & Social Impact for Cotopaxi, and graduated Harvard Business School. He’s served as Chief of Staff & Special Projects for Canopy Aerospace & Defense, Head of Investment Strategy for Black Lab X, is an Operator In Residence for Saturn Five, and is now the co-founder of IMPCT Group.

Wendy Lakso & Keita Franklin (Columbia Lighthouse Project): Wendy Lasko is the Director of Partnerships and Military & Veteran Initiatives at the Columbia Lighthouse Project. She previously served as the Director, Partnerships, Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention at the Department of Veterans Affairs and as the Deputy Executive Director of the PREVENTS Task Force in the Executive Office of the President. Dr. Keita Franklin is the Chief of Behavioral Health at Leidos where she focuses on advancing mental health, suicide prevention, and wellness initiatives. She previously served as Specialist Executive at Deloitte, where she was the lead for the government and federal practice on topics related to mental health, suicide prevention and substance abuse matters. Dr Franklin is also the co-director of the Columbia Lighthouse Project.

Joshua Prado (Western Governors University): Growing up in California, Josh joined the military out of high school, serving as a F/A-18 C/D Hornet Avionics Technician and Plane Captain. He’s gone on to become a technical trainer, recruiter, entrepreneur, and lifelong advocate for the military community. He founded VETD Talent Network, and today serves as the Military Relations Manager at Western Governors University. He’s a die-hard believer in the power of education to uplift and change lives.

Deke Letson (Veterans Exploration): Deke Letson served 10 years in the army, including two deployments in Iraq, where he says he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Five years after he was honorably discharged, Deke started having flashbacks and found out he had delayed onset post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Deke enrolled at Red Rocks Community College, where he took a small business entrepreneur class. For a class project, he came up with Veterans Exploration Therapy. Three and a half years later, VetX has served over 750 veterans and family members, with each adventure giving way to an opportunity for healing.

For more on MCON: https://mcon.live/

You can subscribe to Defense Gameday here: https://www.youtube.com/@DefenseGameday

I’m writing this on Veteran’s Day, and find myself once again struck by the wide range of man. From bickering with twitter bots to exploring the galaxy, we humans really can do it all.

And Veterans, more often than not, are the giants among us.

Thank you to each of you who has served - and to those of you who support them.

This week is our second installment of the MCON Gameday lineup — as a reminder, MCON is the nation’s largest celebration of military culture.

From national memorials to mental health advocates to entrepreneurs, this week’s lineup of veteran-leaders is packed with inspiration and meaning.

Thanks for taking the time to check this out.

Jonathan Chia (Reality Center): Jonathan Chia is an American entrepreneur, director, producer, philanthropist and Army combat veteran. He founded the Reality Center to provide technology that facilitates positive change for humanity. Our vision is for everyone in the world to have access to tools which improve their mental, physical and spiritual wellness.

Jennifer Ballou (Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation): Jennifer Ballou is a veteran, nonprofit leader, advocate and speaker focused on the art of resilience and joy. From overcoming trauma herself, to being hand picked to help stand up the Resilience Program for Fort Fort Bragg, NC - one of the largest installations in the Army - and ultimately at the Pentagon, in Washington DC, Jennifer today serves as Chief of Staff for the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation.

John Wayne Troxell (Fmr Sr Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): John Wayne Troxell was the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Today, he is a brand ambassador and advisor to over a dozen organizations, including Hiring Our Heroes, Beaverfit USA, DownRange Supplements, Allied Forces Foundation, and more. This senior military leader is reinventing himself as a business operator and advisor, building his firm PME Hard Consulting.

Gregory Frey (Avalon Action Alliance): Greg is a leader in philanthropy and a veteran & military family advocate. He is the Vice President of Strategic Engagement and Partnerships for Avalon Action Alliance, a group that connects our nation’s veterans and first responders to life-changing care while removing barriers that prevent them from receiving support.

Benjamin Bunn (Warrior Rising): Ben is an Army veteran, performance advisor, business development leader, and small business owner. He founded Cigar City Crossfit in Tampa, FL, and supports a veterans through Warrior Rising, which empowers U.S. military veterans and their immediate family members by providing them opportunities to create sustainable businesses, perpetuate the hiring of fellow American veterans, and earn their future.

For more on MCON: https://mcon.live/

You can subscribe to Defense Gameday here: https://www.youtube.com/@DefenseGameday

We’re featuring a different “valley” this week.

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know many veterans at the their moment of maximum uncertainty: career transition.

The “four walls” of the uniform, orders, and military hierarchy provide comfort, certainty, and stability.

As they fade away, often a sense of meaning and safety goes with them.

We traveled out to MCON, Waco Hoover’s celebration of military culture, to learn more about the veterans serving this crucial community. Over two days, we had over two dozen conversations with incredible entrepreneurs supporting finance, fitness, national defense, mental health, economic opportunity … and a whole lot more.

This is a different kind of valley, but as I reflected on whether or not to share with the Crossing the Valley community, I believe that sometimes we are all guilty of occasionally allowing the tech rather than the human to take center stage.

Each of these individuals is an incredible human with many more stories to tell than we captured in 15 minutes. I hope you’ll feel free to reach out to any of them (or to me, if I can help connect you).

And if this isn’t for you, don’t worry, we’ll be back with our regular programming soon.

Thanks for taking the time to check this out.

Defense Gameday Presents: MCON Gameday

Tony Teraivanen: Tony is a Navy veteran, CEO, TEDx Speaker, Nonprofit Executive of the Year, Veteran of the Year, SD500 Honoree, Professor, and Community Servant. He founded the “Support the Enlisted Project”, or STEP to improve financial wellness, combat food insecurity, and otherwise support Veterans, and their families. The program has an eye-popping 90% long-term success rate.

Emma Przybyslawski (CTV alum!): An Air Force veteran turned businessperson, Emma went from AFSOC to a Managing Director at Gartner, to VP of Space and Defense at Govini, and today, leads Strike Solutions to deliver exceptional mission outcomes to the force.

Sally Roberts: A State Department sports diplomat, entrepreneur, Army vet, and former elite athlete, Sally is dedicated to advancing women’s wrestling and strengthening opportunities for the next generation. As the CEO of Wrestle Like A Girl (WLAG), she has played a pivotal role in securing NCAA Championship status for women’s wrestling, ensuring that female athletes have the same avenues for success at the highest levels.

Carl Governale: After 15+ years as a Naval Special Warfare Officer, as well as multiple graduate degrees and post-graduate fellowships, Carl is leading the fight to get special operators the mental health tools that build resilience, strength, and show them a path to a better future. As an Account Exec at Chimney Trail Health, Carl provides actionable, evidence-based mental health and cognitive defense for elite performers in high-pressure environments.

Eduardo Ortiz: From software engineer to product strategist to entrepreneur, Eduardo is obsessed with removing friction that prevents people from accessing critical services. Following two tours of duty with the United States Marine Corps and several civilian agency stints, Eduardo became Executive Creative Director of the United States Digital Service. He founded Coforma and built a 150+ person team to build technology that serves all people.

For more on MCON: https://mcon.live/

You can subscribe to Defense Gameday here: https://www.youtube.com/@DefenseGameday

About Nathan Diller

Nathan Diller brings a rare combination of operational military experience, government innovation leadership, and private sector execution to the defense technology ecosystem. After 22 years of Air Force service as a test pilot, he transitioned to become Director of AFWERX, where he managed and expanded the SBIR budget, helping hundreds of startups navigate government contracting. His subsequent role on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee staff gave him legislative perspective on defense budgeting and acquisition. Now, as Head of Aerospace & Defense at Divergent, he’s applying this comprehensive understanding of the ecosystem to scale manufacturing innovation here in America.

About Divergent

Divergent has created the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), an end-to-end software and hardware production system for industrial digital manufacturing. The company’s approach combines digital engineering for structural optimization, software-driven printable design, efficient 3D printing with optimal part stacking, and robotic assembly. Initially proven in the automotive sector (building the world’s fastest production car at 253 mph), Divergent is now applying this technology to aerospace and defense applications. The company has raised approximately $700 million and maintains partnerships with automotive giants like Aston Martin, Bugatti, and McLaren, as well as defense contractors like General Atomics.

Key Takeaways

1. Build Credibility Before Asking for Trust: Rather than asking aerospace customers to take leaps of faith on unproven manufacturing processes, Divergent first established extensive qualification datasets in the automotive industry. Working with prestigious brands like Aston Martin and McLaren created a foundation of trust and technical validation that transferred to aerospace applications. This methodical approach to building credibility through data is essential for safety-critical industries.

2. Position Government as Innovation Partner, Not Just Customer: Instead of viewing government agencies as traditional procurement customers, Divergent saw them as partners in reducing technical, regulatory, and financial risk. Nate emphasizes working directly with government laboratories on airworthiness qualification and regulatory approval processes. This partnership approach opens up highly regulated markets that would otherwise remain closed to innovative manufacturing methods.

3. Navigate Qualification Through Incremental Value Creation: The path to qualifying 3D printed aerospace parts requires starting with non-safety-critical applications and systematically working up the value chain. Divergent began with items like C-130 hubcaps before progressing to more complex and safety-critical components. Each successful qualification creates an “artifact” that supports the next level of applications, building a comprehensive case for regulatory approval.

4. Design for Adaptability: Traditional manufacturing requires building “bespoke factories for every system,” creating massive capital expenditure with limited flexibility. Divergent’s adaptable production system can manufacture completely different products on the same equipment, creating both capital efficiency and strategic uncertainty for adversaries. This adaptability enables rapid scaling and pivoting between different applications and customers.

5. Leverage Cross-Industry Applications for Risk Mitigation: By maintaining operations in both automotive and aerospace sectors, Divergent can aggregate demand, share development costs, and reduce risk across multiple markets. The company’s ability to “print hypercar frames in the morning and cruise missiles in the afternoon” demonstrates how cross-industry applications can create more resilient business models and faster technology development cycles.

For more on Divergent: https://www.divergent3d.com/

For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com

Follow Nate: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-p-diller/

Follow Noah: LinkedIn | X