Chariot Defense launches from stealth: high-voltage battlefield power systems for the next generation of military drones and directed energy weapons

the studio, Adam from Chariot Defense, announcing the company. Welcome to the stream, Adam. How are you doing? Where are you doing? Great. Yeah. Calling in live from Detroit here. Uh long time listener, first- time caller, big fan of the show. So, fantastic.

Uh are you in town for Reindustrialize or are you you're not a Detroit native? In town for Reindustrialize. We just launched on stage uh a couple hours ago and congratulations. Let's uh let's ring the gong for hit the gong for a company announcement. We haven't hit the gong enough this uh this show. Congratulations.

uh now uh break it down for us, introduce the company, uh explain what you do and how and then we'll go into some a bunch of questions and stuff. Awesome. Yeah. So, Cherry Defense is solving a problem that I faced as the counter US program manager at Anderoll.

Uh where we constantly ran into challenges fielding all these new drones, electronic warfare systems, edge comput systems at the edge in expeditionary contested environments. Constantly ran into power as a limiting factor. Mhm.

I was also the head of product Archer, worked at Uber Elevate, Kittyhawk, saw really advanced commercial technology coming out of the EV, EV tall industries, high voltage lithium batteries, advanced power electronics, and saw DoD stuck with low voltage lead acid batteries, massive generators.

And so what we're doing at Chariot is building advanced power systems to power the next generation of military technology in austere environments. What's the core business model? Are you going to sell to the defense primes, to countries? Are you going to go to program of record?

How does how does the business model work? Yeah, the great thing about this company is we have a lot of different business models that we can pursue simultaneously. So, we can sell directly to the government to provide power systems that can bolt on to their existing vehicles.

We can sell to companies and other OEMs who are developing new vehicles and help them turn those into hybrid electric basically rolling power stations that can provide all of the equipment you need to put on those to make them survivable.

And we can sell uh directly to companies uh uh and we can sell alongside companies. So if someone's developing a a laser system uh that systems be a lot more effective at the edge uh with one of our power systems alongside it. So got a flexible business model to government to business and international.

It's can you help me uh kind of understand the the the general scale of the amount of energy that you're aiming to put out kind of the band? I've talked to Doug over at Radian. He's targeting the the one megawatt diesel reac diesel generator with a nuclear reactor.

How what are we talking about and what is relevant at that kind of power band? Yeah. So we're in the kind of 50 kilowatt range is kind of our sweet spot.

So really what we're solving for is during counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were operating either from fixed bases with massive infrastructure um or we were doing kind of short patrols at the edge where really all you needed at the individual unit level was a radio and a rifle.

And so you kind of have this power gap in the middle for expeditionary environments for things like directed energy, you know, so a company like Eperis, a company like Aurelius developing these systems that require 30, 40, 50 kilowatts of power. The existing military platforms we have can't output that kind of power.

But the power system needs to be able to deploy down onto a vehicle that can actually be mobile, can fight in a distributed uh environment. Yeah, this feels uh hyper relevant to some of the the reporting I was reading about kind of the Ukraine Russia stalemate.

Apparently, it's just like drone on drone warfare every single day at a complete it it's like World War I level like stalemate and just like almost trench warfare but just drone based. And so I imagine if you want to deploy a new anti- drone system on the edge, you need to bring it in and you need to bring in power.

What is the alternative? Would people bring in some sort of diesel generator or uh I don't know fire logs or something? What what what's the state-of-the-art and then I want to walk through a little bit about like how your solutions better. Yeah.

So the state-of-the-art around power today is either massive diesel generators. Um they're good at turning fuel into electricity, but ultimately they're they're very large. Uh they take up a lot of space. Um not very mobile with with lighter weight, more distributed forces. uh they're not very reliable.

Those generators fail all the time. Uh and then all of your systems go down. Uh they waste a lot of energy. Um and so if anytime you're running at less than your peak load, what you see at the edge is highly variable loads. And your generator is not going to perform on that environment.

It's going to throw away a lot of energy. And most critically, the challenge is the signature management. So that generator puts off a massive thermal and acoustic signature.

And what you've seen in Ukraine is people don't use generators within 30 kilometers of the front line because they know that that thermal signature is going to light up like a Christmas tree on an IR drone and be immediately targeted. That's fascinating. That makes sense. That makes a ton of sense.

Now, so um how like how how if we if we comp this to the enterprise HR platform market, uh uh obviously you're starting with something like that looks kind of like a point solution. not to use the wrong term or something, but you you know it it's this one product. Uh talk to me about how you think about it.

Is this like we want to add on solar modules soon and then we're going to add on wind farm you know connections or you know talk to a nuclear company about partnering there or is it more about different form factors in battery technology like what are the different vectors that you plan to kind of expand upon versus um partner on?

Yeah. So if if you think about the name chariot, it kind of comes from in 2000 BC the Sumerians used another source of power besides manpower for the first time, horsepower. So we talked about earlier on the pod, you know, the horse is the first autonomous vehicle. Yes. We love horses.

Horse is the first, you know, power source. Yes. Uh for the military. Yeah. And so, you know, we saw, you know, a transition, you know, from horsepower to steam power, from steam power to the internal combustion engine, right? Both really transform military uh operations.

We see a similar transition going from you know pure combustion engines to high voltage hybrid systems. Um and we want to build the power infrastructure for that.

So what we want to build is the energy storage, the batteries, uh the power conversion and the power electronics and then the power control layer that actually manages power at the edge.

Today someone will go plug in a coffee pot and it'll brown out the air defense radar because there's no logic sitting over these grids at the edge. Okay. Uh, honestly, sometimes coffee can be more important than air defense. I do got to say caffeine pretty key. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you So, you might want to write the You might want to write the logic to be like, "This guy needs a cup of Joe. " Yeah. Let him bring down the air just for five minutes so he can get But maybe that's a plug for Yerba Mate. You don't need to plug in your coffee coffee if you're drinking an energy drink.

It's already made for you. That's right. When did you When did you start the company? When when when did you uh when did you actually start the company? Uh so I started the company last fall. Um we raised our seed uh from General Catalyst and XYZ. Um working with really great investors.

Um really happy to to have those guys on the team. Uh and yeah raised the grade the seed back in the fall. Uh within three months we were at our first exercise powering lasers, powering electronic warfare systems and within six months we were at JRTC.

So when when uh when Secretary Dan Discoll and General George, Chief Staff of the Army were on the pod. Yeah, they said they were going to go to that exercise the next week. You were there? That's where we were. No way. That's amazing. I was going to ask about that. Army modernization. That's amazing.

So that was 6 months from the first uh check into the company. We were aerosoling equipment into a force onforce exercise. Had the opportunity to brief Dr. Alex Miller, General George at that event. Show them what we were doing supporting the war fighter. That's really cool. Uh sorry to go back to a technical question.

uh signatures from uh batteries essentially like I I've heard like Tesla's put off EMF. Um I imagine that there's you know you talk about rare earth magnets like there's a lot of stuff going on in an electrical system. Is any of that still need to be shielded?

Like what can you tell us about the the future of as we transition? What's the next uh discussion we're going to be having about uh keeping troops safe? Yeah, certainly. So, uh, a lot of it comes down to, yeah, hiding below the noise, right? So, signature management.

Uh, you know, any anything pushing a lot of power is going to have some kind of detectable EMI. With a battery, it's easier to shield it. It's easier to put under cover because there's no exhaust like there's from a generator. Sure.

What a generator actually is, is a giant spinning magnet that's generating an electric field that then induces or generates magnetic field which induces electric field which actually generates the power. So, significantly lower EMI. Yeah.

Um, and I think part of survivability in in the future, like how do we how do we have our troops survive? What would I want? You know, going to the front lines in Ukraine, you want to be able to reduce your own signature. You want to be able to raise the noise floor.

So, this this kind of expeditionary power system also allows you to set up deception decoy type operations where you've got a bunch of different things on the battlefield that all look kind of like uh yourself. Mhm.

And uh so you're lowering the noise, you know, lowering your own signature, you're raising the noise floor, and then you need advanced countermeasures, things like directed energy, high powered microwave, high energy lasers. All of that really depends on kind of this this fundamental power architecture. Yeah.

Any insight so far from re-industrializer of investor? Every time you go try to wa watch a talk, some investor hounding you, trying to hand you a check for your series A. Uh any any insight so far? It's it's been a great event. you know, um, we, uh, we love being at an event like this.

There's a lot of other people developing, you know, core technology here, right? New new countermeasures, new sensors, new drones. Um, we really kind of see ourselves as kind of building the picks and shovels of this defense modernization effort.

And so, we've had a lot of great businessto business conversations here, companies who, you know, they can focus on as, as you know, Bezos says, you know, making their beer taste better. Uh, and that'll and we can kind of solve this this fundamental problem for them.

So, um, it's been great businessto business, uh, collaboration here. had a lot of great conversations um about partnerships. Uh it's been a great event. Amazing. I want to talk about some of the tradeoffs of dual use in the context of storytelling around your company.

Uh this feels like something that it's military equipment, but it doesn't seem super dangerous to give to an oil and gas company. It doesn't seem like as regulated as nuclear weapons or, you know, missiles or something like that.

uh this feels like it would be directly applicable in a bunch of other industrial scenarios. Uh at the same time, as an early stage startup, you have to focus. You might not want to tell the story of, hey, we're going to do this and this and this and then all of a sudden investors are like, what are you actually doing?

Like just talk to me about your hang out with Dan Driscoll. Like you're clearly having traction there. Um what's the long-term plan? How important is focusing at various points in time?

How how important is agility and the ability to soak up a DoD contract when things are good there and they have a need, soak up a oil and gas contract when the industrial base is expanding. Uh how do you think about the tradeoffs both on the business side and then the narrative and storytelling side?

Yeah, it's a great question. There's been a lot of talk around dual use. Uh you know, we are a dual use but defense first company. Um we actually think that this actually enables a really interesting uh play when it comes to critical minerals you know bringing back the themes of reindustrialize.

Uh we are selling to DoD first. They are the ones who are willing to pay the most for that US supply chain right for the ruggedization uh and for the sourcing of of materials from allies. Uh this allows those companies to have a demand signal. Right?

If you're building you know if you're building lithium refining DoD is not going to buy refined lithium. They want to buy a capability. But we can say hey we'll buy that US source lithium into cells into packs, right?

We'll deliver that as a capability to DoD, you know, be able to pay that early, you know, uh, price premium that it's going to take to get down that cost curve.

Um, so we see ourselves as helping other companies, uh, kind of re-industrialize, uh, in addition to us, you know, having that customer that really focuses us at the beginning and building a, uh, truly great product. Uh, the go to market is obviously very different as well.

And so we've definitely focused the team there, but we see as we start to see some of these early contracts land uh the ability to focus then on disaster relief, oil and gas, mining, right? Other off-grid industries uh that have this critical need for power.

Potentially the best news in the reindustrialized world or theme other than the conference uh this week has been that Apple is buying something like a half a billion dollars of uh rare earths from MP Materials.

Uh from your experience, you're obviously trying to reindustrialize, probably trying to build as much as he's re-industrializing. Oh, he's reindustrializing. Yes, he's actually industrializing. He's reindustrialized.

Um but uh what what in the supply chain do you think that we should be having the biggest conversation about? What's the next thing that we got to focus on reshoring, re-industrializing around? What's underrated? What's the thing that people should be learning about?

Now everyone learned about, well, we don't make the iPhones here. Then people were like, well, we don't have the rare earth elements. Then people learned what TSMC was. What should we be talking about in the supply chain for what you do in terms of largecale American industrial capacity? Yeah.

And uh on the on the reindustrialized theme, one of the best hats I saw today was industrial-based. That's great. So, yeah, love it. Pick one of those up.

Um you know, for us, uh yeah, the the supply chain for for batteries is is a case where, you know, along with many other industries, we we really invented a lot of technology here and and then handed it over to China.

Um one of the biggest companies now in the world, you know, CL, uh that technology initially came from a company called A123 Systems. Um it was incubated in the US. It was developed in the US.

Massive investment uh from the government into that uh capability development but ultimately mistimed the market ran out of cash and was effectively bought up by and and then licensed to uh to China. And China now dominates this critical industry around lithium iron phosphate batteries.

Um and so that was a a technology invented here and handed over there. You see a similar thing with DJI, right? We had great companies here, you know, Skyo in the early days, 3D, Chris Anderson, and we effectively seated, you know, that that thing invented in the US to China.

So, it's on the on the battery cell side and then on the battery pack manufacturing as well. Pack manufacturing is is one of those kind of underappreciated parts of the battery value chain. Uh, especially building safe packs for DoD that can pass those certification standards.

So, just to clarify, the company you were talking about is CL. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. I just looked it up. We're gonna have to do a whole deep. This is fascinating. Never heard of this company before. Uh, and I want to know way more. Obviously, uh, we can't have you you tell us the whole story.

So, we will we will dig in, uh, soon. We'll hopefully have you back on the on the show soon. And we hope you enjoy the rest of reinduction. Congratulations on the launch. I say hello to literally everyone. Yes. Say hello to everyone. And I I just want to say I can see why you've been so successful to date.

You're very very uh very impressive and I'm glad that you're building this company. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me on, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Um, let's tell you about eightsleep. com. Get a Pod Pod 5 Ultra. They have a 5-year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns, and free shipping.

The best sleep of your life. Podcasters sleep on eight sleep. That's right. Um, and our next guest is here. We will bring him in. How you doing, Misha?