How Chariot Defense Replaced Product Market Fit With a Weight Test
Adam Warmoth took this interview from Fort Carson. A division commander had called him the Friday before and asked him to be in Colorado on Monday, so he was in Colorado, sitting in a vehicle with a Starlink terminal doing the work of an internet connection. Ross Fubini, who wrote Chariot’s first check, opened by pointing out that this is every call he has ever had with Adam.
One guest measuring things in the field, while the other measures the field. Both agreed to be unusually specific about how they make their decisions.
About the guests
Adam Warmoth is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense. He started in the Stanford lab of Ilan Kroo, who had just come back to teaching after founding the first electric aircraft company on Larry Page’s money. That led to Kitty Hawk, then to Uber Elevate as one of the early employees, then to Anduril at roughly 200 people, where he built the counter intrusion business unit and then took over counter UAS air defense.
Ross Fubini is the founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital. He was first money into Anduril and first money into Apex Space. A very long time ago he introduced Palantir’s first employee to its second. When he started XYZ almost ten years ago, the premise was simply that he should back people coming out of the Palantir ecosystem. He describes that premise as having been correct, “shockingly so.”
About the company
Chariot Defense builds the power layer for the battlefield. The Amphora systems are modular, high voltage, and low signature, and they charge and run the things that now go forward with a unit: drones, radars, comms, sensors, directed energy. Founded in late 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, Chariot came out of stealth in July 2025 with an $8M seed led by General Catalyst, and announced a $34M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in February 2026. XYZ was in both. Systems have been through JIFX at the Naval Postgraduate School, up to Alaska with the 11th Airborne, out to a National Training Center rotation with the Black Jack Brigade, and onto DIU Project GI.
Adam’s framing of the market is that there are three critical infrastructure layers under any robotic modernization story: comms, compute, and power. He thinks Palantir has taken the network layer and Anduril has taken edge compute, and that power is the third slot, and that after those three there are not really any more slots.
Five Things
1. Useful has a weight…and soldiers do the math
Adam does not use the term “Minimum Viable Product,” preferring instead “Minimum Useful Product.” For Chariot, there is a physical test for that determination: You hand a soldier your system. You hand him a box of identical weight and volume filled with MREs, or ammunition, or water, or Zyn. You tell him to pick one for the mission. Until your box wins that trade, you have something you can test in the field, and you do not have a product.
Lots of founders describe product-market fit, but I’ve yet to hear one describe it as a volumetric tradeoff against ammunition. It’s clean and simple, and requires no advanced analytics.
2. The feedback that counts comes from the guy who did not want to be there
Adam’s rule number one of new equipment training is to remember that the people in your training are not the people who will use your system. They are the people who happened to be available when a commander received the request to send some bodies. They are not your champion. They are not the innovation officer. They are more likely than not junior enlisteds trying to get through the day.
Which means their feedback is invaluable. They are the ones Chariot listens to. Not the enthusiast, not the sponsor, but the guys with no reason to care. Because if you can make that person’s day easier, you may really have something.
Adam is careful to say that this barometer is not sufficient, that you still owe the program office and the general officer engagement and the congressional work. But it is a much better north star for early feedback.
3. Be so good they refuse to give back the product
Chariot took systems to the 11th Airborne up in Alaska for a demo supporting DIU. Everybody used them. They plugged the Anduril Pulsar into them. When it came time for the team to head out, the soldiers said “not so fast.”
Adam ultimately left the gear behind (and did not charge for them) because they were early prototypes. Turns out, those prototypes (serial numbers 1 + 2) are still up there today. And the knock-on effect was that the first production unit went to Alaska as an actual sale (not SBIR revenue or an R&D proof of concept).
Ross calls that an incredibly uncommon signal, and I have to agree with him.
4. What the product does not do determines the speed of sale
Chariot booked early product revenue through DLA Tailored Logistics Support while OTAs and the other vehicles were still being set up. Adam is clear that this is not the right path for most products. It was the right path for his because of a list of things it did not do: the system did not fly, so it required no airworthiness cert. It does not emit, so it required no spectrum approval. It did not have to connect to a network for base functionality.
Hence, leveraging this pathway did not post undue business risk.
Bottom Line
Chariot walked into a capability requirement that had been stuck in requirements land for about four years. Some people who cared about power had seen the problem early, and had started to work the requirement. It was not funded, not approved, and had no field of vendors already bidding.
That, Adam says, is “luck.” If the requirement had already been funded and contested, he would have been late. If there was no semblance of a requirement, he would have been too early. Chariot arrived in the narrow band between those, and then used field credibility with senior leaders to help push the requirement across the line. In so doing, Chariot became a champion of the program office.
Bonus: What does it mean to be a first-check funder?
Ross is something of a legend in first-check defense land.
“I believe that I have one job, and my job is to get the next round of funding done,” he says.
Because he has watched enough companies go from seed to A to B to C, he can connect what the founder is doing now to what the capital markets will need to see later. The line that stuck with me was his example of the advice, which is not the usual encouragement. It sounds like this: because we did that eight months ago, we can tell this story now, which means this round gets done at a billion and not three billion.
In my opinion, most investors claim to be value-added while selling a commodity, but that level of pattern matching stands out. It only works, if the investor is close enough to the operating detail to know what happened eight months ago. Ross says most people do not have the patience to go that deep.
Sourcing Founders
For the aspiring VCs out there, Ross was pretty blunt about what’s enabled his success: he goes to the founders he has backed and says the problem is that he cannot find anyone as good as them. Then he asks who else they know. That’s it.
He doesn’t care about “seeing every deal” and he doesn’t build a fancy scanner.
He focuses on “walking a network” and asking its best members to name the next one.
On What Will be Built Next
XYZ has two internal views of defense. Either you become the standard, or you are wildly different. Ross believes Chariot becomes the standard for battlefield energy and Apex becomes the standard for satellite buses. Everything else has to be genuinely odd, such as his other investments: the “only secure 5G network,” and/or the “only ground autonomy integrator that goes from wheels to autonomy.”
Too many defense tech companies will die in the middle. “Ten percent better,” or “it works in this one environment,” or “I have this one key relationship” just will not work.
Chariot Defense: Website | LinkedIn
XYZ Venture Capital: https://www.xyz.vc
Crossing the Valley: https://www.valleycrossers.com
Adam Warmoth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamwarmoth/
Ross Fubini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fubini/
Noah Sheinbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
