About Dan Wright
Dan combines deep operational experience with strategic thinking about technological competition. Starting his career as a lawyer at Goodwin Proctor, Wright made the transition to technology by joining AppDynamics as one of the early employees, eventually becoming COO. He then served as CEO of DataRobot before co-founding Armada in 2022.
Dan combines three critical elements that prepared him for building Armada: legal expertise that taught him to understand complex regulatory environments, operational experience scaling enterprise software companies, and a data-centric worldview developed across three technology companies focused on extracting value from information.
About Armada
Armada has positioned itself as "the hyperscaler for the edge" - building distributed cloud infrastructure for the 70% of the world not served by traditional data centers. The company's core product line consists of modular data centers called Galleons, ranging from suitcase-sized units (Beacon) to megawatt-scale facilities (Leviathan).
The company's strategy centers on three technological convergences: Starlink bringing fiber-quality connectivity to remote locations, the explosive growth of edge data generation (75% of all data by 2025), and the rise of AI capabilities. Armada combines these trends into a full-stack platform that processes data locally rather than sending it to centralized cloud facilities.
Operating across 70+ countries with over 10,000 connected assets, Armada serves both defense customers (including active work with the US Navy) and industrial clients in energy, mining, and manufacturing. The company has raised over $200 million from investors including Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Microsoft, with their latest $131 million round announced alongside their "American AI Dominance" strategic framework.
Key Takeaways
1. Be All In. Wright learned from Founders Fund's Trae Stephens that "with public sector, you are either all in or you're all out." Armada took the lesson to heart, building government-specific capabilities from the get-go while simultaneously developing parallel commercial applications. This dual commitment allowed them to capture validation from faster-moving commercial customers while building the long-term relationships necessary for defense contracts.
2. Lead with Solutions, Follow with Technology. One thing that stuck out to me about Dan was his honesty about this fundamental truth: "Nobody wakes up wanting to buy new technology. The only thing people want to buy is a solution to a problem." Instead of leading with their technical capabilities, Armada starts every conversation by understanding specific customer pain points - whether that's three-week data processing delays on offshore oil rigs or real-time avalanche response needs in Alaska. This approach transforms technology sales conversations into problem-solving partnerships.
3. Build Trust Through Progressive Value Creation. Rather than requiring customers to commit to a complete platform transformation, Armada designed their offering for incremental deployment. They start with basic connectivity needs, expand to IoT device management, then scale to full edge AI processing. This progression allows customers to validate value at each step while building confidence in Armada's capabilities.
4. Time-to-Value as Competitive Differentiator. "Data is by far the most valuable at the moment when it's generated. Then the value drops off a cliff as time goes on." While traditional data center deployment takes years, Armada's modular approach delivers functionality in weeks. This speed advantage becomes decisive in time-sensitive applications and creates significant switching costs once deployed. Infrastructure stickiness combined with rapid deployment creates a powerful competitive moat.
5. Using Tactics to Become Strategic. With all the noise around AI, Dan has positioned Armada not just as an edge computing company, but as a critical component of American technological competitiveness. By connecting their distributed AI infrastructure to national security imperatives and the US-China technology race, they've elevated their company narrative beyond just another capability, to the heart of nation-state competition. This strategic framing attracts both investment and talent while creating urgency around their mission.
To learn more about Armada: https://www.armada.ai/
Follow Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wrightdh
Follow Crossing the Valley: https://www.linkedin.com/company/crossing-the-valley
