And instead of building mobile apps or AI chatbots, competitors will hack Ukraine's front-line surveillance tools, electronic warfare systems, counter-drones, etc.—battlefield technology is gaining traction among tech investors. It's sparking a funding frenzy.
“[Build] “Hard Technology for the Defense of the West” Hackathon Judge I have written Encourage applicants with X. “Defense, Drones. Organizer “Gundo” I have writtenpromote your event using the city's nickname.
Until recently, employees at high-tech companies have been hard at work applying a fast and agile startup mentality to the production of deadly weapons. In 2018, when Google signed a deal with the Department of Defense to develop AI to target drone attacks, thousands of people petitioned the CEO to cancel the deal.protests like this The issue prevailed during the Trump administration, when workers fiercely opposed plans to sell augmented reality headsets to the U.S. military and facial recognition tools to immigration officials at the southern border.
But after a decade of pushing a utopian vision of the future, the tech industry's most optimistic pitch is a return to America's past. Out is what connects the world. The rearmament of the weapons of democracy has begun.
From 2021 to 2023, investors poured $108 billion into defense technology companies building a variety of cutting-edge tools, including hypersonic missiles, performance-enhancing wearables, and satellite surveillance systems, according to data firm PitchBook. , the defense technology market is predicted to grow rapidly, increasing to $184.7 billion by 2027.
Hackathon organizer Rasmus Dei Meyer, 20, a third-year diplomat at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, said he believes there is a lack of interest in defense work among younger generations who grew up amid the turmoil of foreign wars, financial crises, and the growing threat from China. He said skepticism is waning.
Day Meyer said that in fragile states around the world, “it is more socially acceptable to be unabashedly patriotic in the national interest.”
For some of this new high-tech workforce and startup founders, defense contracting is a higher calling to extend American ideals into the next century. This group is (mostly) male and believes in hard work, true innovation, and family values. They are eager to accelerate America's progress. And a growing number of investors can't wait to back them.
According to the Defense Investor Network, at least 30 funds specialize in the market, investing in newly coined sectors such as defense technology, deep tech, hard tech and space technology. Most have a militaristic brand, including Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Fund, General Catalyst's Global Resilience Fund, and Shield Capital's Frontier Technology Fund, whose motto is “Mission Matters.” It is being raised. On Wednesday, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator announced a new fund focused on defense, space, and robotics.
Trey Stevens, a partner at Founders Fund, said this public embrace of nationalism signals a major shift in Silicon Valley, where values have long been out of sync with the rest of the country.
In 2014, the company's founder, Peter Thiel, directed Stevens to find companies developing technology that protects U.S. interests that could be sold to the Pentagon. Stevens, whom Thiel hired from Palantir, a CIA-backed data-mining startup, said he was only able to find one company in three years.
There are now dozens of companies, including at least seven unicorns valued at more than $1 billion.
Lobbying budgets from venture capital firms as well as Anduril, Shield AI, and Skydio, which Mr. Stevens co-founded, have similarly grown.
This cultural shift is being driven by growing anxiety in the tech industry as economic and geopolitical threats collide. Rising interest rates, fragility in global supply chains, and China's rapid militarization have raised concerns that the United States, and perhaps the industry itself, could become vulnerable.
“Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a reminder that defense technology is not just a theoretical discussion,” Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a speech at the Defense Venture Summit in November. I let him do it,” he said. She said: “We knew that history was beginning again and a new era of violence was ushering in.”
Increased use of drones in Ukraine has prompted the Pentagon to make its notoriously difficult procurement process more friendly to tech startups, making it easier for investors to fund technology deemed critical to national security. Efforts such as federally guaranteed loans were initiated, and improvements were withered that became venture fund capital.
As the bubble deflated and startup company valuations fell, “everyone panicked,” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at venture firm Compound. Some developers wondered if they were wasting their time shopping around for software. This period of exploration and self-doubt gave venture companies the opportunity to declare defense technology to be the next big thing. He said investors still lack certainty about where to focus their efforts. Is it the climate? Is it AI? Is it American dynamism? ”
The latter is becoming increasingly attractive as the tech industry continues to shed jobs. A Morning Consult survey of 441 technology workers last March found that 34% were more likely than a year ago to apply their skills to military projects, and 48% were involved in battlefield technology. It turns out he supports employers considering defense contracts.
“If everything goes well, you don't have to do the hardest thing to make money,” Stevens says. “But this is not the moment to print money anymore.”
Silicon Valley industrial park
Military ties to tech companies go back to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley began in the late 1950s, when funding from the defense and intelligence agencies turned an area of orchards into mainframe and microprocessor production.
Margaret O'Mara wrote in her 2019 book that these relationships diminished in the internet age, but slowly resumed after 9/11. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Palantir, co-founded by Thiel, was one such company created during the War on Terror with support from the CIA venture In-Q-Tel.
To counter the threat of stateless terrorist networks, the defense establishment reversed Cold War-era pipelines and turned to private industry rather than government-funded laboratories. The Department of Defense launched VC companies and sponsored hackathons to build commercial technology that could eventually be sold for military use.
Efforts have escalated since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Secretary of Defense has appointed Tim Cook, Apple's longtime vice president, to lead the Defense Innovation Division. The Defense Innovation Division is a division designed to rapidly develop commercial technologies for national security and will report directly to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In August, the Pentagon announced the Replicator program to quickly build and field thousands of drones within two years.
The Israel-Gaza war has exacerbated divisions among workers, with more than 500 Google employees protesting the company's $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government in December.
Still, the overarching message from elites in both Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley is techno-optimism, said Jack Murphy, an Army special operations veteran and former Army Ranger turned investigative journalist. “We believe there is a technological solution to everything,” he said. “Are we losing sight of the reality of what AI will do on the battlefield?”
But some tech investors are presenting the study not as an outlier but as an opportunity to return to mid-century American values. “The very things that once defined our national identity – our faith, our family and our flag – have been undermined,” Boyle said in a speech at the National Defense Summit. The speech was a clarion call to investors and founders. “A war with America can be won if we fight with complete nihilism.”
The clarion call from El Segundo, where the hackathon is held, is less formal. Located between a Chevron oil refinery, a wastewater treatment plant, and Los Angeles International Airport, the city was once home to contractors manufacturing parts for airplanes, rockets, and missiles. Then, in 2002, SpaceX set up shop. Today, here we deadlift, chew nicotine gum, and chug energy drinks as founders of space, energy, and drone startups try to bring coolness back to American manufacturing. It has become a paradise.
Augustus Dorico, 23, founder of Rainmaker, a startup that aims to alleviate water scarcity by “seeding” clouds with minerals, is building a local tech community into San Francisco's prized engineering community. He called it a “cultural project'' that denies culture. .
There you can make a million dollars without doing much work or adding value to the world.
Dressed in a fashion-forward mullet, Nike high-tops, and casual swagger, Dorico's aesthetic, which he calls “Americana,” dates back to the Enlightenment, Gilded Age, and 1960s, when technology advanced significantly. Looking back, he felt that it was an ambitious and honorable thing to be an inventor, creator, and builder.
So enthusiastic were the visits from software developers looking for a jolt of energy that Dorico set up bunk beds at Rainmaker's headquarters. ““O home pilgrims to Gand,” he said.
Believers also evangelize online, posting social media bios such as “Ask me why it's good to expend energy and why I should have more babies,” and chanting religious hymns and They share a motto of trying hard, which may be akin to a military slogan. “Well. The world is dying for you to build,” one anonymous poster wrote to her X, using the abbreviation for “good morning” favored by crypto insiders.
Several Rejecting protests against previous technology eras, specifically Project Maven, a Google project that targeted Pentagon drones. Former Google researcher Guillaume Verdon said in a recent podcast interview with Palantir co-founder and tech investor Joe Lonsdale that this labor dissent ultimately benefits America's enemies. He said he brought it.
“What I saw with my own eyes was the culture destruction within Big Tech,” Verdon said. This problem led him to help create a philosophy that Effective accelerationism, or e/acc, advocates accelerating technological progress through unrestricted capitalism. This mantra is popular in the defense technology world, where some have adopted the moniker e/acc, sometimes replacing e/acc. “e” with American flag emoji.
Others in the field see their work as preventing conflict. “I don't support the neocon warmongers of the past,” Dorico said. “Defense is good, but war is still bad.”
Kat Hendrickson avoided a Big Tech job after earning a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering in 2022. She wanted to see her own research. Address real problems in conflict zones.
Still, Hendrickson, a technical director working on autonomous drone development at Episi, a Poway, Calif.-based startup, says he freezes when he hears the word “patriotism,” especially if it's “really co-opted by a nation.” “There is,” he said. It’s the far right,” she said.
Hendrickson said the war in Ukraine made it easier to explain his work to friends and family, but the war in Gaza sparked a lot of discussion at home.
“If you look at Ukraine, the military front lines, those are your targets,” Hendrickson said. “If you look at Gaza from an Israeli perspective, you're bombing a city. It's just different.”
She and her team discuss safeguards that can be put in place in case their products are later resold or misused, whether intentionally or not. “I always tell my team that I hope everyone is as comfortable as possible.”
Meanwhile, Day Meyer and the hackathon's co-organizers are focused on building a pipeline of young talent. Their organization, Apollo Defense, aims to bring together undergraduate students to create or work in their own defense technology startups.
“This deep sense of anxiety about the future… [that young people have] It can be molded,” Day Meyer said. “We have agency to shape that future. And the way we shape that future is by building the best weapons possible to ensure war never happens.”
