Defense Unicorns co-founder on modernizing software delivery in air-gapped, mission-critical military environments

Very cute name for his business

and then intense business because he's getting software to war fighters. He's in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in [music] to the TVP Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Rob? Look at that. Look at that.

Look at that.

Look at that friendly unicorn.

Friendly unicorn. Uh please uh introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building and how it's going.

Yeah. Rob Slaughter. Uh you know, uh spent my career uh in the military. I spent about 13 years active duty. Uh got out with some co-founders about 5 years ago. Uh like to joke around that I spent first half of my career uh struggling with with software and the back half of my career trying to solve the software delivery challenges. uh started this company cuz uh you know we saw a real huge problem. Uh you know it's hard to tell cuz the the most most of the ecosystem most of the industry especially on the defense or especially on the tech side doesn't have a ton of exposure to defense. Uh you obviously read the big headlines. So you get the the the big news. Um everybody understands we have the best military in the world. Uh you know the recent operation uh in South America obviously highlights this stuff. Um, but there's real significant tech challenges uh that, you know, as a company we we really strive to solve. Uh, so we're super excited to to talk about the series B and uh, you know, announce uh, a lot of the good stuff that we're doing.

How much did you raise?

How much?

Uh, we have officially raised 136.

Uh, so it's quite, you know, uh, been fantastic. Uh, you know, we're we're obviously excited to get back to building. Uh, obviously love what we do. And you're a unicorn now, which is amazing because

we got we got we got to do a a capital allocator acknowledgement. Bane Capital is is the uh leading the round.

Yeah. It feels like if you put unicorn in the name of your startup, you're really asking for like you're you're calling your shots so aggressively that everyone's going to be like, "Oh, they they'll never do it." And you did it. So, congratulations.

I do I do wonder if there was ever, you know, during the the the deal process they were like, "Well, we want to do nine." Yeah, like I'm sorry.

I can't possibly it will [laughter] destroy the brand. Uh where where does the name come from?

Yeah. So, a couple things. Uh first and more first and foremost, uh we hire unicorns. Uh and so it's hard to find those people uh that are mission focused. They, you know, typically have clearances.

Uh

uh they typically have like clearances. They're based in the US. Sure.

That's the other thing. So, one of the biggest things is that we hire defense unicorns. Uh the other thing is if we're successful as a company, yeah, uh one of the biggest things we'd like to see in the ecosystem is like it's not going to be just, you know, 1, 10, 20 defense unicorns in the ecosystem. There's actually going to be hundreds or thousands. So just like, you know, quick back of the envelope numbers, you know, for folks, you know, you look at somebody like Nvidia, uh and they do, you know, 200 billionish uh a year revenue. You know, you have a department of war that spends a trillion a year.

Uh that's five fivex that. And you know, as you guys mentioned earlier on the show, you know, Trump's talking about increasing that to to 1.5 trillion.

Uh, and so when you think about this from like a market opportunity perspective, um, what you actually find out is that there's most most likely probably several, you know, multi-trillion dollar companies. And then when you cascade that down, what you're actually going to find is that there's not just dozens, but hundreds of defense unicorns um, that should be entering the ecosystem.

Okay. Very cool. And and uh, I agree. I think I think it'll be positive for the ecosystem. Uh what uh how like how do you how do you guys work with other software companies like what like break down the platform for us and and how the how everything actually works.

Yeah. So uh first talk about the the problem. Uh one of the biggest issues is it's combination of three things. uh one these are mostly air gap systems and to define an air gap airgapped is either fully disconnected uh semi- disconnected or extremely high firewall. So think about like security polic policy settings to where things like GitHub are inaccessible. Um the next issue is like the super high cyber security standards and a lot of the accreditation standards that the government expects. And then the third thing is that there's actually a huge skill gap delta between what you see on the industry expectations and what you typically see in like military spaces. Um not just the defense industrial base but but a lot of times the people who are actually operating these systems are actually active duty airmen, soldiers, sailors and marines.

Um and so a lot of the technologies that we work with are Kubernetes based. Um and and so to just say it, you know, uh you know, how this is really operating is you have people uh generally wearing a uniform that has to actually operate things that's incredibly complex. Um their core day job is is firing missiles and and and and you know, guns on target. Their primary day job is not IT operations.

Um and so what we do as a company is we have an open source baseline called UDS that allows people to integrate in an open source fashion. we have the ability to take those applications and you know uncclassified environments, classified environments and really our bread and butter is extending those to actual edge weapon systems. Um so things you know F-16s, F-22s, um our largest customer is the Department of Navy, specifically the submarine community. Um and so you know really for us it's about how do we have like a whole of nation approach? um you know, if we're going to uh enter a nearpeer adversary type of engagement, how do we actually, you know, have the ability to inject latest and greatest technology from anywhere around the country to some of these uh you know, new weapon systems?

Last question for me. Uh I remember talking to Sham Sankar at Palunteer and he told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palunteer. They built uh a piece of software, put a bunch of dots on a map, right? he goes to deliver it and the machine that they tried to install it on had like you know one megabyte of RAM or something and so it just couldn't run the software and I'm wondering you know you have this Panasonic tough book on your website uh how do you think or how do you work or do you work with your customers to understand where products can be actually deployed because once you're beyond the air gap you're probably doing more things on device on at the edge uh what what are the hardware ware con uh constraints. I imagine that there's a ton in the age of AI. You can't just run llama locally on some 10-year-old tough book. Uh how are you working with clients on understanding hardware and how it will enable their software to be delivered?

Yeah, you nailed the problem which is uh in in these military systems if you want to do a software update you effectively have to update the hardware. Oh yeah. And that's why the hardware is so out of date is because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver didn't deliver. So you're stuck with a legacy system. Now that happens two or three times and before you know it, people are still stuck on, you know, wins Windows 95.

Um, you know, to take your, you know, true story. Um, you know, those types of things are are super common. So, so how do we actually, you know, find success? How do we actually enable the war fighter? Well, if you actually make it easy enough to deliver, in many cases, you don't have to update the hardware. Um, in your example, certainly you do. It's already gone too too far. But a lot of cases, what we're doing is we're finding, you know, certain weapon systems, um, you know, they've had a hardware, you know, refresh, if you will, say a year or two, you know, ago. It's not the latest and greatest, but it can actually run way more software than what was available 2 years ago. Can you actually do a software update on that slightly older hardware to make it mission effective? And then you also nailed, you know, key fundamental point, which is, you know, these things, you know, modern AI is is a is a memory hog. Yeah.

Um, and if you're going to war with outdated hardware, which is the reality, uh, and you're trying to get the latest and greatest AI, you actually have to have the ability to update the software on demand.

Um, so you might be flying a mission and saying, "Hey, I need this specialized, you know, local AI model."

And then the next day you're running a new mission and you might might actually need a different AI model. um the way war is conducted today, that would actually be a full reset. That'd be a whole new maintenance period. The jet or the the Navy ship would actually go down. You know, it's not really viable. Uh with Defense Unicorns, you actually have that capability.

That is good to hear. Uh well, congrats on all the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Break it down for I love a business where it's so clear that you had to experience the problem as a team for a decade and uh makes so much sense to just, you know, keep hiring veterans that uh have experience the the the real pain, not just heard about it on a on a podcast or something like that. So, uh super super exciting and and really congratulations on uh all the progress.

We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, great to meet you.

Have a good rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

Goodbye.