announced it had completed a fundraising round<\/a> of $1.5 billion at a $12.7 billion dollar valuation.<\/p>\nThat single raise accounted for more than half of the $3 billion San Diego startups pulled in this year, according to Pitchbook, an industry research firm.<\/p>\n
This concentration of venture capital reflects a national trend: investors rattled by economic uncertainty are seeking safety in numbers.\u00a0Now, billions of dollars are flocking to just a few companies positioned to capitalize on that uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Shield AI is illustrative of this, poised to profit from the unrest in Ukraine and war in Iran.<\/p>\n
The company builds AI pilots for aircraft, drones and other vehicles designed to operate in high-threat environments without GPS. The startup was founded in 2015 by former Navy SEAL Brandon Tseng and his serial entrepreneur brother, Ryan Tseng.<\/p>\n
Neither responded to a request for comment, but one of their advisers did.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first time AI has been deployed in defense,\u201d said Craig Lauer, San Diego angel investor who advises Shield AI, and a number of defense tech companies, including SkySafe.<\/p>\n
Shield AI was able to recruit some of the top talent from SpaceX and Tesla, he said, because smaller startups allow \u201cyoung ambitious engineers to dream up some of the greatest technologies,\u201d and execute faster than the \u201cslow moving\u201d\u00a0 incumbents like GE Aerospace and Boeing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes VCs go \u2018Oh wow, the market is opening up.\u2019 It\u2019s no longer an old boys club from the military industrial complex,\u201d said Lauer.<\/p>\n
Firestorm is another San Diego defense tech company that brought in over $40 million last quarter \u2014 and $82 million on April 29 \u2014 for its military manufacturing approach.<\/p>\n
The San Diego company developed a high-tech 3D printing technology that allows troops to manufacture weapons on site, often at remote locations.<\/p>\n
Think of it like a drone factory that fits inside a shipping container.<\/p>\n
The need for Firestorm tech is visible in Ukraine, where cutting-edge defense technology has proven nearly impossible to deploy. \u00a0\u201cThese main supply lines are really big fat targets for the enemy, so if you can get your manufacturing on site, that solves a huge problem,\u201d said Jake Windle, investor at Harpoon Ventures, a San Diego-based defense tech venture capital firm.<\/p>\n
From a venture perspective, Firestorm checks all the boxes. Its 3D-printing tech can be used commercially, it can upgrade to meet strict military standards, and it tackles a massive logistics problem that every modern military is trying to solve, Windle explained.<\/p>\n
San Diego-based Fabric8 Labs is another 3D metal printing tech company that produces complex, dense metal parts without post-processing. The company pulled in over $56 million in the first few months of the year.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s advanced manufacturing technology has generated millions for its potential to supply data center customers and computer processing chips.<\/p>\n
Instead of just investing in a cool technology, venture capitalists are being careful with their cash, increasingly looking at how a specific problem could be solved \u2014 which in turn incentivizes innovation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s inherent pressures in the venture world that dovetail really nicely into the inherent gaps that the Department of Defense cannot tackle internally because they can\u2019t incentivize people the same way the commercial market would,\u201d said Windle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The day before Valentine\u2019s Day, rumors surfaced about a local company\u2019s plans to raise a billion dollars. Executives…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":791594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,64,1582,276,1370,3549,7264,158,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-791593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-sandiego","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-top-stories-sdut","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-united-states-of-america","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","21":"tag-us","22":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116562938298719326","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}