In 2019, we started Vannevar with the belief that the public servants that put themselves in harm’s way should be supported by the best engineers in the United States. Our national security works best when America’s best technologists are building directly with pilots, infantrymen, intelligence officers, and others to solve real and urgent mission problems.
We believed America’s traditional defense companies, while well-intentioned, were falling woefully short of their responsibility to the country. We still believe this is the case.
Over the last several years, we’ve built products used by the United States in critical contests happening with China today, including controlling adversary perceptions, disrupting overseas political and economic investments, and identifying malicious maritime activity. We believe winning these contests today prevents war with China tomorrow.
Because of our focus on competition, everything we build is deployed immediately in operations. We don’t build for rehearsals, synthetic environments, or future operating concepts. We deploy against missions that are moving the needle on strategic competition in Asia, South America, Europe, and the Middle East.
This is counter to most defense companies (and defense spending), which are primarily focused on new platforms – planes, ships, munitions, etc. These are sorely needed. But we are not doing enough as a country to drive the odds of conflict down as low as they need to be. We believe upping the country’s game from both a technology and mission standpoint on strategic competition is how we do that.
Because of this, we’ve invested heavily in the technology stack that we believe is required for competition across:
- Sense: what new data collection is needed for competition
- Decide: how we make that data actionable to inform target development and operational plans in competition
- Act: how we deliver effects in competition
To support these missions, we’ve done everything from reverse engineering for data collection behind the firewall, to building attritable RF sensors deployed overseas for detecting illicit maritime activity, to honing LLM-powered operational assessment tools that inform aircraft carrier deployments.
This focus has paid off. Over the last few years, we’ve gone from $3M to $80M in revenue, 1 product to many, unprofitable to profitable, ~30 people to ~200. We did this while only spending $12M of venture capital since starting the company in 2019. As of October 2024, we were valued at $1.5B, making us the most capital efficient Defense unicorn likely by an order of magnitude. We remain the only technology team focused on competition.
We’re at a pivotal moment. China has spent the last decade pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable in international norms with relative impunity, including regularly violating the airspace of sovereign nations and leveraging influence campaigns, economic pressure, and in some cases bribery to control key political decisions around the world. They’ve invested aggressively and effectively in improving their military technology with a focus on prevailing over the United States in Asia. Their best minds are dedicated to these missions.
And so are ours. We’re taking bigger, more aggressive swings to develop technology to support missions we feel are critical to this competition, including cyber, economic warfare, and sensing. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and top American engineering talent, we believe we can create an advantage for the US that reduces the likelihood of military conflict.
The country needs a defense prime building technology to win the competition with China. We intend to be that prime. If you share our commitment to this mission – join us. The time is now.
