Rivet Industries wins $195M Army contract for next-gen AR soldier goggle, raises $90M total

seamless ad buying across the globe. That's right. Uh, do we have our next guest? Uh, we do. I think I believe our next guest is in the reream waiting room right now. We'll bring him into the TVP Ultra Jump. Good to meet you. How you doing? What's happening, guys? How you doing? Thanks so much for having me on.

I feel like I I feel like I need to say thanks uh nine times. I need to say thanks nine times. Uh we I mean we love we love uh being thanked. Uh maybe you know uh but save some of Thank you for coming on. Thank you for being you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being Thank you for raising capital.

Thank you for building. Yes. What a fabulous time to be alive. Yeah indeed. Um let's kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. Um let me tell you a little bit about Rivet.

We founded the company about a year and a half ago and we the the team has just been cooking furiously. The the the fundamental philosophy that we have is there's about a half a billion people in the western world that have been completely and totally underserved by big tech.

This is people that do hard jobs in hard places. So you think people on flight lines, people in factories, people in bucket trucks and people on the battlefield. We feel that the most transformative application of AI and augmented reality is with these people.

So we set out to build a portfolio of products to do to do just that for that group of people. That's that's fundamentally probably the most important uh group of people uh operating, building and defending our way of life. Yeah.

Walk me through like one case study of someone actually using uh using your product uh to get more productivity. Yeah. Yeah, as you can imagine, I mean, you even had Dr. Karp on yesterday talking about everybody from plumbers to people sitting in doing financial analysis, etc.

When you think about somebody, let's let's pretend uh they're in an aerospace manufacturing facility, you've got a substantial amount of telemetry coming off of machines, tooling, the actual aircraft itself, and you've got a glut, or there is a deficit of people that are actually able to do that job efficiently.

the application of reasoned intelligence delivering to folks uh on the flight line that are, you know, operating with tools in a heads up hands-free fashion. John, wow. Is is is going to be the most uh the most giving Zuck a run for his money there with the Ray-B bands.

Those are those are those look these are the these are certainly better than Ray Bands. Whoa. Shots fired. Boom, boom, boom. It's amazing. Um, yeah. Talk about the progress of the of the business. Uh, there's a new army contract. Uh, where are you in that process? What does it mean? And how did it come together?

Yeah, this this program specifically with the army is probably the most important thing that I will do in my career. Uh, to tell you the truth, I can I can cut to the punchline. I am holding in my hand a contract executed with the army for $195 million to deliver the next generation of soldier born mission command.

So that's where we are in the business. The team we started from a clean sheet of paper back in January of last year with a determined focus to build the most comfortable, most rugged, most utilitarian uh uh fighting goggle for the army uh that's ever been seen. And that's what we've done.

So we were we were selected u over the past few months in a in a very rigorous source selection process. Talk to me about lessons from the soldiers computer from IVAS from hollow lens. Yeah, it was a what 20 year 30-year process um and uh there were lots of concerns about weight uh lots of money spent.

How do you tell the story? Yeah, you've touched on you've touched on a lot of areas that are of vital importance to us. In fact, when we started the company, we thought about that whole set of a half billion people in the world that are underserved by modern technology and we boiled it down to four big things.

What do they need? They need a system that is comfortable enough to wear for the duration of a mission. For a guy in a bucket truck or a flight line, that might be eight or 10 hours. For a, you know, a paratrooper doing an airfield seizure, that's 72 hours. So, comfort is number one.

Yeah, you need ruggedization because all of these people doing the hard jobs are doing the job in the most austere of environments. So you need a fully rugged device that is shockproof, dustproof, you know, uh protects against water ingress, can handle the percussive elements of using tools, jackhammers or guns, etc.

That's number third. And finally, you need uh you need a compliant device. And compliance is is is a very broad category of statutory and regulatory things that these kind of products come under. And that is specifically over the supply chain.

Specifically, you can't have bad guy parts in a device that's going to be deployed in a secure environment. There is governance over what constitutes eye protection.

Whether you're on the factory floor and you need true eye protection, that's ANZY compliance for for for not getting your eyes hurt in those kinds of environments, or whether you're a a soldier on the battle battlefield needing ballistics and laser protection. And then finally, utility.

Utility comes from the ability of the actual face computer and the enduser productivity system to be able to connect to other data, get reasoned intelligence at the point of need.

Where that utility comes back full circle to the enterprise is now you have let's say the enterprise ontology has a set of eyes and a set of ears that understand the enterprise the way that the human would and that's the doop that we're creating with these dynamic task systems for these frontline workers.

Um, is the why now basically just we're in a phase of I don't know technological commoditization where miniaturaturization of batteries and and chips is at a point where it's just we're getting to a place where you can functionally deliver everything that you said and like do you think it would have been possible to build this 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

I I that that that u John it was a perfect prompt like I was going to answer your question exactly that in fact this device could not have been built 5 years ago. So you have a confluence of a bunch of things happening.

If you think about just the supply chain and the underlying components that go into products like this and you think about the amount of capital that's been poured into them by all of the big tech companies that you know you know what Zuck has actually spent he reports it quarter over quarter on his on on his on the mixture reality lines in the report.

That's something like 60 65 billion I think the last I checked.

Y certainly know what the other big tech companies net net you put the sigma on the bottom of that column and you get something like a quart of a trillion dollars has been invested in the underlying things that emit light combine light bend light the processing capability that can go in a small form factor remaining thermodynamically compliant so it doesn't burn your face uh etc.

So all of that supply chain has come together and it's a very hungry supply chain because for 10 or 15 years they've been promised that everybody in the world is going to be wearing these things and that's where the market has actually gone wrong.

Augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality has largely been a technology looking for a problem rather than a solution to a big industry's articulated need and that's what we've built and what we're focused on. Yeah. How how important is SLAM? Like some simultaneous location and mapping I think is the acronym.

But uh the actual idea of like overlaying images into the real world versus just a HUD that is static. Like when I'm in Call of Duty and I do a 360 no scope, the map, the mini map stays in the same part of the screen the entire time.

Uh when you're in, you know, the Apple Vision Pro and you put a screen down, you turn your head, the screen stays in the environment. There's benefits to both. What's your take?

I I think that there there is a ratio or proportion of what is world locked and what is headlocked and what is body locked in every application scenario and you have to have the right thing to make the best user experience and that user experience has to cog you know contemplate the cognitive load of the end user the environment etc.

No doubt slam and the ability to create a you know a holographic can and put it on the table and stay locked. So as my perspective on the can changes, it's rendered appropriately. And then being able to do that fast enough so there's not some oculovestibular discomfort that causes you to want to y puke uh is critical.

So when we think about advanced manufacturing scenarios, specifically the installation of a part on an aircraft, you want to be able to line that up very accurately. And when the and the quality control guy comes past, he's got to check and validate that it's in the right place and installed correctly.

So in that sense it's very it's it's very important in other use cases you re you know you referenced the call of duty uh kind of thing some course or three off base just like hey I want a crude kind of location like I'm looking this way there's some nouns that are bad or good on this side of me you can reduce the amount of six off or you know high high fidelity slam that you have to do uh long-winded answer to your question it's critically important to have uh that capability in the system and available to application developers that are developing with it to build a good experience for the end user.

Do Yeah.

On that flexibility point, but do you want to create two different hardware stacks because I imagine uh a three off headset could be lighter, could have longer battery life, like you're just doing less things and so maybe you can have some savings that you pass along to everything else or or is this just not an issue anymore?

uh the the the issue is becoming further and further less severe or less acute as cameras and processors and the actual algorithms themselves become more efficient. Uh certainly the the market that is most important to us and and where we're focused uh we don't need a $300 consumer device. Yeah.

What what folks need on the battlefield on the aerospace flight line is a high precision high performance device that delivers both a quick and dirty kind of crude direction of where you need to go to get to safety or or to do something important and then also the super high prevision uh tracking that would be required on the aerospace manufacturing floor.

How are you thinking about dual use? I I we saw a hot take from a uh from a founder on the timeline a couple weeks ago saying that like uh going dual use too early can be a risk.

Palunteer is a great example, but it's kind of an accidental dual use company and they spent 20 years wandering the wilderness and it it you know it it took a long time to build that. Uh some people have been saying go do go do go dual use on day one.

Other people have been saying, you know, wait and maybe it emerges in a decade or two decades. Maybe it's your second act uh along like long down the road. How do you think about the trade-off of of balancing? Well, I think I I think it's circumstantial to the individual company and the individual product.

For us, we thought about dual use immediately. When I say, hey, there's a half a billion people that are underserved by big tech and underserved by this product. That is half a billion people that are doing this exact job.

And whether they're on the flight line or in the bucket truck or on the battlefield, largely the same kind of persona working in that austere environment.

For us, the the army contract is is an incredible is an incredible thing for us primarily because if we get it right for the most size, weight and power constrained user that is the most hard on their gear and operating in the most critical environment, we get it right for everybody else. And that's what we've done.

So that market will come. In fact, uh when I started contemplating about the the the thesis and our product development and go to market direction, I thought maybe this the the the the commercial market would be serialized behind.

But what we've seen just 6 months out of stealth as people are looking at the product, they're hungry for it and they're ready for it. So this is going to happen in parallel.

Um, you know, I I I've referenced the Army contract where we're where we've got uh signed scopes of works and execution agreements with some of the biggest aerospace manufacturers in the world to do exactly this thing on both the military flight line and the uh the commercial flight line. It's fantastic.

Uh you're out of stealth. Give us the fundraising update. Gotten got news for us. Yeah. Um I I I got to tell you something. It's an incredible situation to have a confluence of these things coming together in the same week.

Uh we just finished our A- round that brings uh total investment into Rivet to $90 million over the past month. Um this is a market that that that our investors believe in. You know, shout out Doug Filipin. We've got Steve Cohen 72 led our seed round and then Dukane Capital. Shout out to them. That's fantastic.

That's great. Yeah, you can't I we just can't customers and supporters.

Yeah, I I love companies like this where you just take a team with like deep deep deep domain expertise and a bunch of advantages right from the start, but then you when when you have that, you have to execute at an insanely high level and clearly you guys are so fantastic. It's awesome to see. Masterass.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Enjoy. Thank you very much for having us on. Lot of fun. I love the show, man. You guys are innovating. Keep doing it. Come back. cuz uh we're we're doing this is an austere environment. There's bugs around. There's dust. You guys you guys need some rivet.

Like honestly, I'm reading I'm reading like chat over here. I'm reading text messages about who's the next guest and stuff. Uh makes Listen, you guys, we got to get you out of the studio and out into the woods to do some like frontline stuff. You want to come shoot some guns and do some cool stuff, we'd love you. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Congrats. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon, Dave. Cheers, Dave. Have a great day. Bye. Bye. Up next we have Mert Mumtas from helas. dev who is telling you about bezel first. Get bezel. com your bezel concier is