Deterrence co-founder Dhruva Rajendra on building robots that manufacture munitions to close the US-China gap

soundboard uh and let's bring on drva how you doing what's going on great to see you look at hat got aon's hat oh you got aon's hat on that's great I got my hat on yeah I heard I heard Aon talking and I decided to bring the meme out of my backpack and that's amazing uh aon's doing the meme you're doing the meme pretty much everybody today is doing the reindustrialize meme thank you for what for what you do it it's defense day half reindustrialize day eventually we'll split these out but uh much like in both important and what Dua can talk about is how industrial capacity historically has been a deterrent yep it's no longer a deterrent but but before we get into that uh or or maybe like the US doesn't have like the actual capacity to be an industrial deterrent anymore but before we get into that drva uh I know you very well but uh introduce yourself for uh the show yep yeah absolutely um well first off I'm really appreciated to be here it's been my dream since I was in high school to be on the technology Brothers podcast um but yeah deterrence just to kind of keep it simple we're making generalized robots that make energetics which is a fancy way to say that we're making robots that make explosives the mission of the company is to close the Munitions Gap with uh we call them the near peer and peer adversaries that the US has around the world we started the company about a year ago as Jordy mentioned he was heavily involved in that kind of founding Journey uh started the company with a couple other guys Brian who is my co-founder at a prior company we started called Latch which was a hardware company that relied on a global uh supply chain and Henry who came over from Tesla and had experience building kind of factories around the world um and uh yeah we we we sort of started to dive in we we heard the headlines of like you know the US is enable to produce Munitions for Ukraine at sort of an acceptable cost and rate started to try to figure out why that was started to visit factories and ask people in the dib like what they thought and you know we found a lot of Technology there that was from the like 1930s and 40s so the last time America had to do a big buildup no you know and not a lot has changed frankly um including like the people a lot of them who a lot of the people who work in these factories are multigenerational so you know their grandparents are maybe the ones who started working on the machine and they're still there um so yeah we talk about talk about the dynamic even in some of these Legacy factories that are producing Munitions that are sort of critical to US National Security you we've like maybe called or facetimed at different points when you're like walking out of a building cuz you're like if a single match went off in that place like everybody would be toast like these sort of uh and and kind of leading off of that maybe like you know how how far behind some of these facilities are and then like what are some of like the broader safety issues because that was a big kind of part of the the Genesis of the company as well yeah safety is a big thing I mean just to start with that you know we've been really diving into the problem for the last you let's call a couple of years and roughly every 2 to 3 months there's an explosion somewhere that unfortunately creates a fatality in the supply chain and you know it's and so like we felt like that was sort of just like a unsustainable trajectory especially as we sort of try to uh uh re reenergize this industrial Bas and yeah I facetimed you for some interesting places I mean I would say like safety standard some places do quite a good job others don't it's like a little bit all over the map but what's fascinating too is like a lot of people are borrowing not just like machines from the 1930s 40s and 50s but also like the safety protocols just haven't been updated to Modern standards and so to give you like a little bit more nuances so like a lot of our team worked on like EV batteries at Tesla and rivan and some other places and so like when they go into these places you know a lot of EV batteries can in a lot of ways be more dangerous than some of the stuff we do because you walk into the wrong room you will you could inhale something that will like kill you um and so when they walk around they're like oh my goodness I can't believe people are walking around with no PPE this and that like but that's just kind of how things are done and it's worked I mean I guess the the other side of it is it's like it's worked for quite a long time so you know you know in some ways you have to like respect the art a little bit but yeah there's definitely room for improvement yeah I I I like that uh with your company like it's so easy in defense Tech or anything just to be like we're g to be andral too and you found like a very like it feels very Niche there's probably still a big Vision at the end of the road but you people for get that like before androll was andal they were like the sensor Tower company uh and they were working they had a small Beach head and then they grew from there and that's how these things start what have been the the pros and cons of of kind of putting yourself in a more Niche box early on and then when you're on the fundraising Trail hiring employees pitching customers how do you still tell that bigger picture story yeah totally I mean like the the rough metaphor we sometimes use is that you know we're sort of like the Shopify right so a lot of what we're doing is we're actually partnering with companies we're building these n weapon systems and munition systems and so when you look across the entire you know spend across the category if you will I think the Army spends about $30 billion on Munitions the Air Force is are like a hundred when you go globally that number is obviously much bigger and so we're we're sort of like in some cases like 20 30% of that spend is basically energetic uh kind of stuff so we that's how we sort of tell like call it like the the market story but I think from like a product story when you're trying to hire Talent especially on the engineering side what gets folks excited is we're sort of intersecting two kind of interesting discipline or three maybe things so which is always fun um two Robotics and then the third thing is like chemistry so a lot like I just like a lot of this chemistry is like super old and so people don't really understand how it works and that's part of why you'll see like people really resistant to change in this market they're like literally if you make one tweak here you might just blow your eyebrows off kind of thing we've met a lot of people who have not all their five fingers let's say doing this work and uh um anyway so like what we tell people is like you're able we're able to like maybe work on some like pretty Hardcore problems that will probably take 10 years to fully realize I guess right and so people get excited about yeah the near-term thing I I like to tell the team internally like we have like a mission that is macro but like there's a lot of like micro things that seem to be happening right now and Robotics Ai and all these other places that you know we're hopefully able to lean into for the next couple decades here uh talk about the continuing resolution which has been kind of an ongoing topic and then what's what's uh what's been your strategy as a CEO of deterrence and kind of navigating that it's definitely been an interesting time to be in DC um I think this may be the most obvious thing that's been said all day uh You' been you live in you live you like live in the DC area and you've been there for years so it's it's it's uh you you've kind of lived it which is different than most people that are just kind of popping in for a week at a time or whatever yeah no totally and I also have encouraged some Founders lately like especially if they're small not like an I mean Andel has a huge team here and stuff like that but folks who are smaller to spend time here because information is moving like pretty quickly like I've I've had things where I take like a meeting with one member and their staff and then across bumping into someone we had met before and like get a completely different perspective on it um yeah look I mean like I think every defense tech company has you know roughly three four layers of stuff they think about right so they think about you know how do I message to my direct customers like the program office how do I message to the building which is the fancy word we use for the Pentagon and how do we mention I work on the hill I think what's unique in the last two to three months is like all three of those things seem to be moving and you've got this added component that the administration is some very specific things that they're trying to get done and so like on the continuing resolution stuff you know what we've been doing is like it's um you know there there's money that can still move around so like our customers still have money to spend so we're in a fortunate spot where they've they're asking for the same thing and we're sort of going to the same program offices for line for stuff that hasn't been expended yet I do think there's a lot of program offices out there just like free advice to any startup who's listening that haven't spent all their dollars It's just sometimes hard to find like you'll have to really burrow in there and you'll you know meet somebody who's like oh I got like $10 million to spend on manufacturing and I have no ideas and you can believe me you can give them new ideas um it's great so that's a component obviously the hill the there's a Reconciliation process that's happening right now those priorities uh I think there's like four or five that have been sort of widely published those all seem to line up with what startups are doing so again my my advice is just get in front of folks and tell your story do it directly too don't always do it through a lobbyist or whatever because no one's going to be better than a Founder at telling their story um and then the last thing I'd say is like you know uh you know the administration's only been around for what 40 50 60 days or something like that and so they've got some of the top level folks but they haven't really put people in seats at the bottom so really getting close to your customer right now is important to help them think through like what they might do and essentially their new management layer kind of Pops in so if you think of like all those under secretaries and stuff like that like a lot of them start uh quote unquote in the seat so there's kind of an opportunity to be like a strategy shaper so you know long with always saying like chaos can be an accelerant for a startup and like that's kind of the situation that youc right now do you have a followup yeah I have a more of like historical question I was just gonna ask for like can you zoom out and just give me like the really basic uh like explain like I'm five on energetics primers explosives you said the Army is spending something like 30 billion my conception of what's going on abroad is like a hand grenade on a DJI drone but like like like how does how does your product actually get into a you know like a weapon system and and and exactly like I I I'm thinking at the level of like I'm seeing cartoon TNT right now but I want to go deeper not far from the truth all that all that time I spent on Cartoon Network as a kid is finally playing off um just avoid all the things with big red boxes on them or whatever yeah exactly so so I mean energetic materials broadly they're basically just a material that has like a high amount of sort of stored energy and then when you apply some you know if you apply another sort of catalyst to it it expends more energy yep so that ex that mean like so if you think of uh explosives uh like fireworks pyro pyrotech stuff propellants like those all kind of fall in energetics um the specific stuff I maybe start with primers that is which is what we're starting with so we're starting with primer for small caliber rounds um so actual like bullets in a rifle that that a soldier would shoot that's right got it so we're inside the bullet that's right so standard bullet has four parts right so you've got the brass which is what Falls to your uh feet when you shoot it um the projectile uh the little powder in there too um so again growing up on on Cartoon Network I assumed that like the gun pwder was the part that went boom or whatever it's like not actually true um it's actually the primer so the primer is in the back of the bullet when uh the hammer hits it it kind of Pops like if you took the primer out and threw it at the ground it's a bit like a cherry bomb um and so what it does is it creates a mini explosion in the bullet and then it burns off the uh gunpowder to start an explosive train and that's what shoots the bullet out essentially like a little rocket right yeah way it's made today and a lot of energetics like the the broad sort of steps that a lot of energetics are made is you start with mixing some chemicals right so we take a bunch of chemical precursors you mix them together in primers those kind of come together and they almost turn into like a a doughy ball if you will that doughy ball is then passed to someone who is at like kind of like an application station these stations are typically in like clean rooms so think like wed did in like on St it's like wetted floor um rubber boots rubber gloves all this kind of stuff so you've got someone who's standing there all day and they're sort of rubbing up and down on these primers like that clay ball basically it's somewhere between it's it's a bit like parmesan cheese on to be honest if you want yeah um and then from there there's like a there's a pressing process that happens so you know um my my cuffer Henry likes to say it's like a lot of what we're doing is this is rubbing and smooshing essentially material um but you want to do it in an even way right because you don't want one bullet to work and another bullet to not work which come back to a second the last step uh obviously you know quality assurance right so just making sure that it was applied in the right way to to have the right like performance characteristic you'd be surpris lot of stuff you can do with like computer vision here where before it was like a human like looking at it being like all right good and now you know deterrent is basically able to leverage like the thing that you know when Dua you know first kind of like pitched me the sort of the high LEL vision for deterrence and we started talking about it what I thought was appealing is it felt like every defense Tech company was going after these super sort of like sexy like oh we're going to you know the sort of f47 like these sort of big programs with this futuristic Tech and drva was basically like had been sort of touring these facilities and saying like look like yeah yeah more so like are we even doing the basics right like if you walk around these facilities and there if we were to get into you know real hot war and we're relying on Machinery from the 40s to produce the basic bullets that we need to you know keep our war Fighters less sexy but it's just as important yeah makes sense that's right and these markets are pretty big right like you look at the5 Shell like just some of the subcomponents we've looked at I mean they're like the contract size for like this the glue is like in the hundreds of millions right not the thing the glue wow basically well we got a good shooting we we we are there some good ranges out in DC we we got to go out there ranges in DC are funny because you look around and you're like oh you're really good I wonder what you do for your day oh yeah for sure for sure uh well well maybe we can live stream it either way we'll definitely have you back soon uh congratulations on all the progress our DC correspondent yeah and we'll talk to you soon see you uh look forward to the next one thanks guys take care see you cool I wanted to ask about history uh we can do it another time just sort of like the history of America's sort of industrial deterrence right this idea that like you don't want to go to war with America because we will just out produce you and it's sort of flipped around and now y China's in a sort of similar position but but we got