Picogrid raises $45M Series A led by Bessemer to integrate drones, robots, and weapons systems for military

the CEO is no longer there.

He's clearly pricing in the 21% nuke salute, you know, where the market at least briefly sells 21% and then hopefully pops back up.

But of course, People are saying it's priced in.

Everything's priced in. Well, uh, we have Zayn from Pico Grid here from the New York Stock Exchange. Welcome to the show. Sorry for keeping you late, uh, for running late here.

Great to see you. How are you doing?

Doing well. How are you guys?

Congratulations. Uh, why don't you give us the news, then I want to go into the product portfolio, the traction, everything else. But what happened today?

So, we announced our $45 million series A led by Bessemer. There we go. Fantastic. Congratulations.

Big number.

So uh take us through the product portfolio, the traction, the latest with Pico Grid.

So Pico Grid, we build technology to help integrate different mission critical systems. So think our sensors, our drones, our robots, our weapon systems. Uh mainly for military applications. Um what that means is sort of we're building the open infrastructure that is the uh the hardware and software tools that make these systems work together. The sort of connected the connected tissue or the glue between these different platforms. Um we have active contracts right now with the Pentagon, with NATO, uh with various allied partners uh around the world supporting a whole bunch of different applications.

Yeah. When when we when we first met uh you had an office in Elsagundo uh

still do still do it felt like uh you know uh a lot of R&D going on, a lot of experimentation, some really great traction with the systems that you'd built, but I imagine that a lot of this funding round is thinking about uh larger scale manufacturing. What does that look like? Uh do you need to, you know, bring on new people, buy automated equipment, set up a manufacturing line? Like what does the next couple years of the business look like?

Yeah. So the the big bulk of the round is going towards continuing to build out a team and with that all the investments in the underlying infrastructure to build out and really, you know, our biggest challenge uh uh the past couple years, John, has just been keeping our head above water, right? keeping our head above of all the demand that's coming in and how we can best serve it without stretching ourselves too thin.

Um, and that is in the past I think three or four months just given all the traction that's that's been building up. We've actually I think 7xed our production line uh and did so uh uh uh as successfully as you can 7x the production line in a couple months. Yeah.

Um and it's been a it's been a it's been a fun journey. So I mean if you're if you're keeping your head above water, is there a tension between wanting revenue diversification from different customers, different branches of the military, different organizations and focusing on one delivering at scale? Is there a tension there or uh is it more of like dual use public private because uh as you sort of uh you know lay out the product portfolio like there there are lots of applications here right

there are and uh you look at the problem that we're solving is really inherent to every physical industry right military just happen to be happens to be a very large physical industry that has that's really leading the charge in the adoption of these autonomous systems the sensors your drones your robots um all of that and it's where the the the integration bottleneck has been most acutely felt. Um and it's so for the reason that we we we for that reason we really uh focused on uh on selling to the military. Um looking forward a couple years I think there will be a a strong commercial presence as well. Um but uh you know one of the things with dual use tech is your sales motion to the military and your sales motion to uh commercial industry are so different right you have to really uh uh bottoms up think uh about how best to sell to each of them independently. uh so you know for the for the time being just given how much demand we've seen on the government side especially the US military but we're now seeing this across allied militaries as well is uh uh really focusing on how can we best serve that application and like you were saying diversify across services but even within given services um there are many many different program offices different customers different uh mission sets that we can and and we are serving and continue to expand out um I was just in Colorado Springs uh yesterday morning uh at an army event a big army event called the right to integrate uh with the Secretary of Army Dan Driscoll.

Uh Monday morning I'll be back in Colorado Springs with uh US Spacecom and so we're able to support a lot of different missions with the underlying technology that we have.

Last question for me. Do you have uh any insight into like the ramp around domestic manufacturing of solar equipment or solar panels? Uh we've seen some companies T1 Energy has been on the show. Uh it feels like there's starting to be momentum there, but what are you seeing in that piece of the supply chain?

It's a great question. I think I've had that question before. Um I think we're seeing like manufacturing across a lot of different industries, especially really critical industries. I think energy being being one of those. Um a lot of that is being um uh sort of redomemesticated.

Yeah.

Um for us, a lot of our uh for the the the solar panels that we do buy for one of the products, Lander, uh most of those actually come out of out of Europe. um we for good reason we we can't use Chinese panels which is where most of them are manufactured. Um so we we're using u European panels

but with that we're definitely seeing a manu a ramp up of of uh manufacturing across all sorts of energy systems and you know hard techch silicon all of that domestically and that's ramping up uh really really aggressively.

Yeah I'm I'm really hopeful. I mean, we've had Casey Hanmer on the show. I'm sure you're familiar. And uh it feels like there's the there's all the ingredients on the capital side. The the AI demand has a ton of demand for solar. Like that that could be another uh big mega trend in the next couple years that I'm excited about. Uh Jordy, anything else?

No. Great to have you back on. Give our best to uh Lynn Martin. Hopefully she's running around on the floor.

And have a great day at the New York Stock Exchange. Have a great weekend.

Great update.

We'll talk to you soon.

Great to see you guys.

Have a good one.

Thank you. Goodbye. Uh,