Rob Slaughter’s company exists because of a year and a half of pain.
Early in his Air Force career he was handed a gnarly problem. It lived right at the intersection of his physics and computer vision background. Despite knowing how to solve it from a tech perspective, the data and systems he would have needed to stitch together all lived at different classification levels. He spent eighteen months trying to work the policy approvals to connect the tools he needed, but was ultimately unsuccessful. In a tale as old as time, Rob then received orders, and he moved on to the next assignment.
But the problem followed him. “Every assignment, every month, every year, same issues. I know I can solve this problem. I just can’t get the software I need,” Rob said. And that’s where the Defense Unicorns story begins.
About Dr. Rob Slaughter
Rob joined the Air Force to pay for his physics degree. After missing out on the ROTC scholarship in his first year, he got it his second. While he initially planned to serve out the commitment and leave, he instead fell in love with the people and the mission.
But the service, it turns out, does not need many physicists. What it does need is people who understand software. Modern physics is computation heavy, so while as a physicist “you are a terrible software engineer,” Rob says you do “know more than probably the person next to you.” So he kept getting assigned to the most software intensive job in the room.
Rob looked at what DIU, AFWERX, and Kessel Run were doing. He liked Kessel Run the most but did not like how locked it was to a single vendor. So he recruited the best engineers he could find, including future co-founders Jeff McCoy and Andrew Greene, and started SpaceCAMP. It was meant to be an open source, Kessel Run style effort for space. Rob believes it ran some of the first Kubernetes deployments in classified environments. About a year later, Nic Chaillan and Dr. Will Roper pulled the team up to build what became Platform One.
About Defense Unicorns
Rob left in March 2021 to start Defense Unicorns. He came to realize that on the inside, you cannot truly control hiring and firing. From his perspective, “You cannot pay people what they are worth.” You cannot keep them. And he was spending much of his time drowning in finance and contracts. “Because it’s so hard to do the simple things, you never actually have time for the hard things.”
There was also a design limit. Platform One existed to stitch together other people’s open source. It was about tuning someone else’s platform. Rob’s big idea for Defense Unicorns was to rebuild from the ground up, with the Pentagon as the only customer that mattered, from the start. The standard dual-use advice was to find commercial traction, get to a Series B or C, then get FedRAMP and back into government. By then, he argues, the architecture is set, and it was “always gonna be a terrible experience” for the defense customer.
The core product Defense Unicorns offers is called UDS, or the Unified Defense Stack. It packages software once and deploys it to cloud, ships, aircraft, and edge systems, including networks with no internet connection. It is built in layers, so what goes on a fighter jet is different from what goes on a submarine or into a cloud. The company’s stated mission is “to make software a strategic deterrent,” which Rob defines as the ability to update software on 100 percent of systems every twelve hours. Defense Unicorns raised a $136 million Series B in January 2026 at a valuation above $1 billion, and its Navy work recently moved from a lab test in San Diego to testing at sea.
And yes, there is a unicorn named Doug. Rob’s argument for Doug goes like this: the company’s largest customer, a submariner named Bill, has spent four decades on submarines in and out of uniform. “You do not have to remind Bill how serious his job is.” A logo with a sharp edge does not make his work feel more serious. People are at their best when they can laugh once in a while. (Rob also points out that the military has always done this, from cartoon nose art on WWII bombers to unit patches.) A little levity goes a long way.
Key Takeaways
1. Choose your first customer by how durable they will be, rather than how easy it comes.
Defense Unicorns went to the Navy first, despite the founders knowing very little about the Navy. Then they went one step further and avoided the innovation shops entirely. Rob is fair to those offices. They are “10 times more welcoming,” and if you are new to defense they are a fine place to learn. But they are personality driven, a PCS cycle can rob you of your champion, and it is hard to bridge the funding gap after that initial pilot. So he asked who the hardest, slowest adopters were, and landed on the submarine community. It wasn’t just that submarines were difficult to penetrate; it was also that submariners were brilliant. “They’re going to listen to reason. If we can actually explain what’s going on, they’d be more likely to adopt it.” The idea was to go to the most influential, difficult-to-win customer first, and make it count.
2. Take the services work!
This advice likely would have gotten a founder laughed out of a pitch meeting in 2020. But despite setting out to build a product company, Defense Unicorns took the services work anyway. That services work created “intimacy with our mission heroes.” Those engagements became the first homes for Zarf, their first open source project. Some of those customers loved the product and moved to fixed price subscriptions. Others wanted to stay on time and materials. Several million dollars of that work lived in civilian agencies that did not fit the bill as a target customer for UDS, so the team walked away from the work. They retained a focus on services as a way to learn the problem. If a services customer never needs the product, then you can still walk away.
3. Stack the small wins.
The first contract Defense Unicorns received was for a whopping $75K. The SBIR line behind it is now about $43 million. Rob’s warning is about growing too fast in one jump: “If you make too big of a jump, it’s hard to repeat that in years after.” His rule of thumb is a big win about every six months. Government customers are used to delays and cost overruns, so on time and on budget is already a surprise. Deliver more than they expect, and they come back with the next problem. Size in this market is a compounding game, not a single swing.
4. Count deployments, not customers.
Founders typically think in terms of large customers and major programs. Rob counts half a million systems across the force, not including ordinary computers: edge servers, fighter jets, Humvees with edge compute. Even Walmart and Chick-fil-A do not come close, and they have central IT functions that do not exist on a battlefield. Defense Unicorns went from 49 systems at the end of last year to about 150 now. You can reach your first $10 million on a couple of customers, he says, so most founders never think about distribution until it is too late. It is also why he will partner with an integrator like SAIC. The Defense Unicorns rule is that customer intimacy always wins, and if you lack it you must gain it. But you do not need a direct relationship on every deal. Partners give you reach.
5. Keep asking “why” until you find the objection you can actually fix.
Defense Unicorns still hears “we’re not allowed to use open source.” Rob’s first move is education: most of your stack is already open source. When that does not land, he keeps asking what the real problem is. It almost always comes back to some form of “a company needs to be behind it.” So the company dual licenses its open source under AGPL v3 or a commercial license. “It literally just gets around the issue.” The stated objection was about licenses. The real one was about accountability. Most sales friction in this market works like that, and the fix is often a contract change rather than a product modification.
For more…
Defense Unicorns: https://defenseunicorns.com/
On Rob Slaughter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertcslaughter/
Crossing the Valley: www.ValleyCrossers.com
Noah Sheinbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
