Josh Giegel has spent his career on what he calls “the wrong side” of the software-hardware divide. He built rocket engines at SpaceX. He built supercritical CO2 power cycles in Ohio. He built a hyperloop and then climbed inside it.
So when he tells you not to build hardware, it should mean something.
Josh started Gambit in 2023, in the middle of the drone gold rush, and deliberately did not build a drone. The decision to forego hardware has shaped the company he’s built, and the impact they’re having just a few years into the journey.
About Josh
Josh grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a nuclear reactor engineer and an electrical engineer. His sister is an engineer. His wife is an engineer. His brother-in-law is an engineer. Suffice to say, the dude has forever been surrounded by tech nerds.
His formative moment came at twelve, in the garage, watching his dad fix the car. Josh assumed his father was the smartest man alive who knew everything. But his dad corrected him that day: he actually did not know how to fix the car. But he knew how to solve the problem.
Josh went to Penn State, then Stanford for grad school, and interned at NASA Glenn at 21, which he describes as “underwhelming compared to the movies.” A colleague pointed him toward a small space company in Los Angeles, so he found himself interviewing with an up-and-coming entrepreneur named Elon Musk in the window between Falcon 1’s third and fourth flights, before SpaceX had ever reached orbit. Musk described building a reusable rocket engine rated for a hundred flights. Josh asked why anyone would want that. The answer was that they were going to land the rocket.
Josh went on to become one of about five engineers who built the Merlin 1D. It sits in the Smithsonian now. He left when SpaceX had grown from 400 people to 2,500 (still the largest company he ever worked for), because he could tell the founding-level experience was no longer available there.
Then came Virgin Hyperloop, where he served as CTO and later CEO across roughly seven years. Six years after starting, he sat inside the vehicle his team had built and put his own life on the line.
About Gambit
Gambit builds a platform-agnostic software layer that lets one operator orchestrate many autonomous systems across air, ground, and sea. The thesis is that robots are commoditizing, platforms are proliferating, and no single manufacturer is going to rule them all. The constraint becomes less about machine availability and more about the people to run them.
Gambit thinks about their product as an entire robot workforce rather than a “better robot.” Each entity is a specialist that works together toward a cohesive whole, much the same way a soccer team has forwards and a goalie, or a band has a guitarist and a lead singer.
The product architecture reflects the thesis: roughly ten software containers, from behavior building to composition to runtime interfaces, that can be split apart and sold in pieces. Behaviors are solved by platform class rather than by manufacturer, so a quadcopter class or a fixed wing class covers many vendors with a parameter file rather than a bespoke integration.
The company exited stealth in January 2026 with partnerships including AWS, L3Harris, RTX, and Sierra Nevada. Since then it has announced two multi-million dollar Air Force contracts, an Army GVSC OTA for counter-UAS simulation, a red force as a service partnership with the Pendleton UAS Range, and integrations with ModalAI and Psionic.
Key Takeaways
1. Disqualify your first market before it costs you two years
Josh’s first use case was missile defense. A salvo of incoming missiles, a set of interceptors, and the weapon target pairing problem between them. It seemed to be a clean technical fit.
He went to a Missile Defense Agency innovation conference and found them recycling slides from three years earlier. “Even the jokes were recycled,” Josh recalls. He walked out understanding that the organization was wedded to its primes, and he backed away.
Saying no in the early days is virtually impossible. There are quite a few founders who would have spent eighteen months trying to make that door open, because the technical fit was so obvious. Josh took one look, read the tea leaves, and pivoted. That willingness to act quickly on a disqualifying signal should not be overlooked.
2. If they will not buy the product, sell them a piece of it
Government cannot easily buy software. It buys boxes. That reality has pushed a long list of software companies into building hardware they never wanted to build, and Josh watched Gambit run into the same wall in the small reconnaissance market.
His answer was architectural. Every customer Gambit talked to already had something. Lattice on one piece of hardware here, an Auterion Skynode on a piece there, a Skydio fleet in teh distance. Josh again took a contrarian path, recognizing that if he gave the government an all-or-nothing ultimatum, most of the time they’d choose nothing.
So Gambit built roughly ten containers and can shred out chunks of them for whatever the customer needs. Gambit’s runtime can sit underneath Anduril’s Lattice, so when an operator tasks a platform in Lattice, Gambit is doing the work on the edge. Gambit gets data and abstraction it would not otherwise have. The customer keeps the interface it already trusts.
3. Your best demo is the one you do not run
Anyone who has never touched Gambit’s software can walk over and be flying multiple platforms inside five minutes. The company frames demos as observer-led. It’s not “watch Gambit do it” but “here, you do it.”
It’s a bold bet but if you can change the narrative from “I saw a guy fly a drone swarm” to “I - a novice who has never held the sticks - flew a drone swarm with Gambit” you are installing yourself in that person’s cold storage.
4. A champion is someone who already believes what you believe
Josh’s definition of a champion is precise, and I loved it because it differs from a traditional defense tech contracting definition. A champion is not someone who likes you or appreciates your product.
A champion is “someone who arrived at the same conclusion independently.”
The one he names came out of AFRL in Dayton, and the belief was that more robots are coming and the force is woefully unprepared. The trap was that the organization was trying to solve everything at once. Josh’s contribution was to break it down to one specific problem: red teaming. Counter-UAS units need multi-drone threats to train against and cannot fly people to generate them.
That narrowing turned into Phase 1 SBIRs, which turned into Phase 2s, which turned into a set of red team contracts. There is also scar tissue to work through in this market. Programs like CODE, OFFSET, and AISUM promised collaborative autonomy years ago and underdelivered, and Josh has had investors who worked on those programs tell him flatly that what he is doing is not possible. His counter is that the mathematics were elegant but the techniques available then were not the ones available now.
5. Speed of modification is the actual product
Six weeks before we spoke, a technical point of contact told Josh he could see A and B, and asked whether A plus B could equal C. Specifically, could Gambit turn an electronic warfare capability from jamming into spoofing, so that a group of cheap objects could be made to look like expensive ones doing something they are not.
Gambit turned it around in three weeks.
Josh notes that almost every contract Gambit has landed in recent months followed the same shape: a conversation, a realization, a response. When they see the speed of delivery, programs find the money to add.
A closing note
Crossing the Valley is rarely an emotional podcast, but I want to share the part of my conversation with Josh that will stay with me well beyond the GovCon lessons.
It was the personal part.
Unexpectedly, we got into what the first company cost him. Separate bedrooms with his wife, a marriage that nearly ended, and the choice between building his company and saving his family. When the Eclipse seed round landed, the bottom fell out at home, and he called his investors to say he did not know if he could be what they needed him to be. Eclipse told him they were investing in him, and to take the time he needed.
As someone who has thrown myself into work at the expense of many other things in my life, I just want to thank Josh for being willing to dive into a difficult topic. And to share with you all the rule he landed on: “feedback within 24 hours.” If a partner, cofounder, or employee is surprised by something, that is a communication failure.
Thanks for reading - and hope you get something useful out of it.
For more on Gambit: https://www.gambit.us
For more Crossing the Valley: https://www.youtube.com/@crossingthevalley
Follow Josh Giegel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-giegel/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
