Allen Control Systems raises $30M Series A to build AI-powered autonomous gun turrets for counter-drone defense

functionality folks boom and we got a great guest we got Steve Simone the man himself up what up Florida man Florida Steve flid what's up he's in Florida today he's not actually a Florida man um but it's great to have you look at me yeah thanks guys thanks for having me on it's it's an honor to be here so describe the company in three in exactly three words I've heard it described as gun on truck is that accurate that's that's true that's ai ai robot gun okay there we go AI robot gun shooting down drone swarms if I see a a light show with a dragon swarm towards me I call you you're going to throw a hail of gunfire at it and take out all of them is that well you know well well it's more Precision you know we're sniping these drones we're not just throwing bullets in the sky you know it's precise Precision well I always love talking to Steve uh while back he was in LA and we like were we were I forget there was something I think it was like actually the weekend that all-in Summit was happening because Steve's raised a couple rounds from Craft now one of which he's announcing today and I and we just had this awesome meeting where I was like you got to think think bigger you got to think bigger yeah I was I was like got you got to think bigger guy the Jord you're the ultimate hype man you you made me think bigger bro you made me think bigger that's great we speak bigger yeah about the news today oh yes today we just announced our $30 million series a led by Craft Ventures um again they didn't give the seed they're back at the a you know maybe they'll do the B we'll see we'll keep it going you know keep it going ride your winners it's in the Allin intro yeah let let your winners ride and saaks is tr's word hold on I gotta ask you guys how much does it cost to like get my logo on the ticker symbol at the bottom you're have to wait till the B you're gonna have to wait till the B buddy I'm sorry it's series a companies is tough yeah yeah yeah I can I I have we talk about it we can talk about have a rough sense of your balance sheet but you're here you got your face you got your face here and and that's and that's worth pric thous I mean how much how much did wander pay for that back there is that we can't disclose we're not we're very against building in public because and it's not it's not because of like the flex culture any of that it's specifically because of our near-peer adversaries copying us if if the CCP got a hold of how the business really works they could clone this show and then it would just be cold war arms race for the best and uh most aggressive daily podc Ian CCP is a big threat I mean why we started ACS is because you know we're at a Manufacturing deficit with China and we need to do something about it so that's why we you know making these gun turrets to be able to shoot down their drones uh talk about uh yeah just talk about the process we we were talking with Delian earlier there's this phenomena within uh startups broadly where there's a culture of having a big vision and fully believing it yourself and assembling people and talent and then sometimes you you have this vision and then it ends up being exceptionally difficult to actually execute you're working in this case with the so for those that don't know Steve sold his last company to Door Dash had a great exit and then you know basically brought together uh did it you know round two uh with his co-founder and so you had that like intense trust uh with your with your co-founder you also were in the military yourself so maybe maybe give like kind of the full background on on you guys together all the way back to the Navy days so the company's called Allen control system named after Luke Allen our CTO and you know we have a proprietary control system that's why you know thus the name just right on the nose but met the name too is very cool Steve was like everybody's calling their stuff like Lord of the Rings like what's the most Boomer tagline that's going to basically like sound like it's been around for decades already and I think it's working I I really like the counter positioning yeah you got a counter position that's all marketing baby um no so we met in the Navy we were nuclear engineers in the US Navy met like 16 years ago and you know then we moved out to San Francisco as one does tries to start startups had a couple that failed and then the one we sold to Door Dash and now this is our technically my fourth startup um it's a way of life you know it's a journey I've been doing this for about 11 10 years now so very cool yeah and then uh coming together like give the or you know company's two and a half two years old now it's yeah two and a half yeah well look it takes to build a complex Precision robotics product it takes about three years like from whiteboard to like really good product so like we're almost you know there on that Journey but when we started it um right when we sold the company to Door Das Putin actually invaded Ukraine the same week when the deal closed and we were reading articles about Ukrainian shooting guns in the air at drones and you know Luke called me up and was like this is a really good robotics problem you know we should start looking at this um and when we kind of surveyed the landscape of the industry of like you know interceptors and electronic warfare and microwave technology and lasers and all these other counter drone measures but didn't see a lot of like really Precision applications around using guns and ammo which you know guns and ammo are widely available in the military so we thought this is a really good idea went after it how's it been uh you guys spend a lot of time on the Range like actually shooting down drones uh talk about kind of how this maybe company's been different to the last one which was you know in a totally different you know vertical and you were probably comfortably in San Francisco now now you guys uh you know spend a lot of time just out in the field uh get the boots dir yeah getting the boots dirty um wait say that again miss the question just how's the culture different now that you're out of the range actually like out of an office you're not in a cubicle all day oh you know I'll tell you I for me it's like I feel most at home in the startup life you know as the companies get bigger and scale uh it it changes things but in the early days it's the most fun actually Luke and I always joke like when you first start a company the first couple months are the most fun when you have no customers because then once you you know start getting customers and you have responsibilities you have to you know deliver their requirements make you know have great customer service and all that so in the very early early days you have to cherish those moments um but then as you know it's a life cycle so as you scale up things get different you become different and the whole company changes but you know right now it's still at a fun size around 34 people still enjoying out of getting out of like the main corporate office and you know doing our thing uh I mean Delian said this on the show before like you know the Ander roll of Ander that is Ander roll and maybe Ander is the power law winner going to do all this stuff how you obviously counterposed with a name you didn't pick another name from Lord of the Rings thank God uh but how are you thinking about how the product fits into the defense Tech ecosystem paler has their AIP program they're openly planning to work with other companies and develop Partnerships is there a world where this plugs into lattice and you let andal take the kind of the the AI connective tissue and your and you're a partner or is are are you really just trying to grow and add so many or more products where does longterm go from here yeah our our product V you know so autonomous guns are when they hit the battlefield they're going to change a lot of the battlefield economics um so you know a lot of these like more expensive Interceptor products or you know some of the you know big laser beams or you know missiles and stuff like um autonomous guns are going to you know put a lot of downward pressure on products like that I think so I think we're pretty well positioned from a product strategy perspective but where where we actually mostly focus our time is you see all these autonomous vehicle companies USBS you companies like ceranic bunch of USV makers these unmanned surface vehicles and then you got like the land ones like Overland or for Tera there's a number of these and so all of these autonomous vehicles need an autonomous payload sure um and so we're positioning ourselves we're mostly focused on great Partnerships with companies like these positioning our product there and then you know kind of bundling you know that you make money via bundling in the game makes sense yeah makes sense talk about competing you know a lot of your competitors are these sort of old slow moving you know I'm thinking about like uh the rhy metals of the world right uh it's probably fun being a team of 34 you know competing against some of these Giants um yeah oh go ahead sorry no interrupted you no go for it I was gonna I was gonna say um it's the lag on the zoom but I was gonna say yeah like Ryan matal kbur you know a lot of I don't know if lot of you listeners know this but in the in the gun turret market so these are called remote weapon stations in the RWS Market a lot of the providers are foreign there so the US buys a lot of their stuff most of it from you know companies that aren't based in the US so from this standpoint we're kind of bringing this back home it's a new American startup building you know new Modern Age remote weapon stations and so I think we're pretty well positioned there from like a congressional standpoint too because like a lot of people in Congress didn't even really realize that that these like slower dinosaurs are actually not even us companies that are doing this for us uh what's what's the vibe on the ground uh in the DC area right now you you obviously like you know have an office out there uh what what's you know is it chaos or people running around there's just to set the table we've been talking about the continuing resolution there's a lot of questions about if DOD budgets aren't increasing will there be net new projects new programs of record uh obviously it you know chaos can be a ladder and an opportunity for new companies and it can also be uh a consolidation Force for the ones who already have uh programs what's your take I think the um well if you look at what like doge is doing and stuff I think it's you know sending shock waves to the dod um and I do think that they're trying to cut things that they don't want anymore and then they have a carve out list and secretary heg has this like list of like 14 technology fields that he's not wanting to make cuts to luckily counter small drone is one of those so we're not impacted really by that now obviously for the fy2 bill we were somewhat impacted because they didn't do a bill um and so that's like I think there Delan was on you were saying talking about that so I don't need to rehash it but basically that that does put some pressure on some startups for us it wasn't too big of an issue because you know most of our stuff is in is in 26 and Beyond but I can see if you were really banking on that that that could be tough uh what are you hiring for right now uh what kind of people are you looking to recruit into the team you got uh 30 million of fresh Capital uh I imagine a lot of that will be going to Bright uh technologists Engineers you know if you're a computer vision engineer and this is like one of the most fun computer vision problems to work on I would say of the different parts of our product you got the the vision system to detect stuff you have the Fire Control to track and shoot um and you have all the hardware and the mechanical stuff the vision part is one of the most challenging parts and so we're looking for you know people coming out of universities that really love this problem they want to see they want to try to find small drones moving against cluttered backgrounds and so you know we're always looking for that kind of talent but you know across the whole engineering Spectrum we're looking for everyone but I would say this is a dream job for a computer vision engineer makes sense uh yeah I on computer vision um is the job getting easier with new models I mean we just saw an amazing uh demo yesterday from open aai it seems like computers are generally getting better at doing stuff with images I would hope that that benefits not just memes and Anime but also self-driving cars and also what you do is there a bridge from that Tech and what's going on there in terms of scaling and improving the underlying models to what you do or are you just kind of like hey we got open CV and it's enough um yeah I mean we're a little bit on The Cutting Edge of you know we're trying to see a very small drone like a DJI mavic on a cluttered background moving very quickly it's not it's not the same exact application as like you know some of the stuff they're doing and self-driving like um we're trying to put a bullet through this drone too to be honest and so like that's another kind of a novel use case and so we need a little bit more out of the computer vision than you know industry is really providing so we're we're on kind of the bleeding edge of some of the research uh around this obviously I would love to just ride the wave and be able to use what's already built and what these guys are all doing but it doesn't quite you know exactly work for what we're doing so yeah there's there's a little bit of like researchy stuff there that we're working on yeah when you think about the opportunity to go work at in computer vision at ACS where they're you're like you know getting the like I I've seen a lot of the videos and you guys have some of these videos like you know public on your YouTube channel and stuff like that but you know getting to work on something where you're actually taking a gun and like taking a drone out of out of the sky the alternative is like you could go work at you know some high-profile you know humanoid robotic companies that are just like you know looking at the laundry or whatever you got to give the robots guns you got to give the robots guns this is what makes it fun this is dy and all our only request is get some unry robots at some point and just put some bullets in them yeah I know I want to have them running over the hilltop like an army of unry robots and then bullfrog sniping them all headshotting them all my I want to see here's the other challenge 360 no scopes 360 no scopes on the turret want to see that would be viral you guys you guys do like sweep sniping you know that from Halo to do that sweep snip yeah yeah you can do that I think JD Vance did that a lot I think he played a lot of awesome awesome crazy lord well thanks for stopping by this is congratulations conrat I'm going to play a quick song for you on the way out you got that congratulations the team and saaks great one yeah congrats to Sachs that's fantastic well we got AJ pipa coming in the temple of Technology from hermas he's coming in in just a second are you familiar with this company very cool building a supersonic plane and their goal has been to build