Allen Control Systems raises $200M at $2B valuation for Bullfrog, its AI-powered counter-drone weapon system

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Our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mike from Allen Control Systems. How you doing, Mike? I'm doing all right, guys. How you doing?

Seems like you're doing more than all right. Got some big more than all right. We are having a fantastic fantastic month around here.

Amazing. Good. Good time to be in the gun on a truck business.

Is Is that the accurate description? Is this all for scaling up Bullfrog? Take us through the product portfolio. Reintroduce the company. Reintroduce yourself and then tell us where you're going.

Yeah, sure. Allen Control Systems. We are a company that specializes in the application of robotics for defense.

Think of the Boston Dynamics of of defense essentially.

We are building an extreme competition robotics.

Oh yeah.

But you guys ship you guys ship.

Yeah. Boston Dynamics. Uh they shipped but it took a long time.

Not as much.

Took like 15. Not as much.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um so we are uh we have our our flagship product is Bullfrog. Bullfrog is essentially a robotic gimbal uh driven by computer vision and machine learning that solves kind of an age-old mechanical problem which is that you can usually only have a system that is very fast but relatively inaccurate or very accurate but relatively slow. In order to shoot down fast maneuvering drones, especially tiny ones like group one, group twos, uh you need to be both fast and accurate. And so by using and applying AI to our control system, we're able to create a robot that can be both fast and accurate. And that's what we do that nobody else in the world has been able to achieve so far.

What's Jordy, please?

Yeah. Talk about the progress over the last year. What what kind of led up to this round and then where you're going from here. Yeah, I mean, you know, we have been obviously kind of working on on this robot for about 18 months now, uh, since we kind of first brought it out to the field, actually a little closer to two years. Um, Bullfrog has been kind of slowly achieving more and more, getting closer and closer to battlefield speeds. In November of of last year, we achieved kind of 100% kill rate against 13 Red Army flown drones. So, drones that are flown by a team of the army that are not telling us where they're coming from or what they're supposed to do or how many they have coming.

Interesting.

Wow. Very cool. Uh, was there already a program of record for this? Like you hear a lot about how hard it is to get a new technology fielded because the the government often knows that they want more planes or more weapons of a certain kind. And most companies that we talk to are usually saying, "Well, we're we we fit neatly in this box." So it was easy for them to procure us. This feels both old and and new. It's like innovative in all the correct ways and maybe leaning on the shoulders of like like what the army can already feel like a truck and a gun.

Yeah. So we are we are not currently a program of record. You know our technology kind of lays in a class that you usually called ahead of a head of need.

Okay. So irre you know requirements that are being built right now

will start to address what this system is capable of doing now

but also what it's going to be capable of doing in the future which is much much which is much much more where we are very fortunate you know this company is really sitting at like just a perfect storm of tailwinds

between the war and the size of the threat and the lack of other solutions that can solve it um you know the the president and the secretary of war created joint task task force 401 which is specifically meant for selecting counter UAS technologies for all services both domestically and abroad.

Um and so we were selected by them to get sent forward uh after after the war started. That is basically a blanket approval for all services including the coast guard and and and secret service to buy our technology and and put it to use. Is is this uh I imagine the sweet spot is like the the DJI size quadrotor drone. We're not talking about shooting down something like a shah shahed shahed drone. Uh is that correct? Is that the focus long term? Do you want to be counter UAS in all classes over time or do you just want to be the best at at this smallcale counter UAS because they're all problems and maybe there's some other solution for taking out the the the the enemy's version of like a predator drone that might be a completely different job to be done of completely different technology.

Yeah, I mean that's that's a great question. We are we are currently very focused on being the best at shooting down group one, group two drones, which are absolutely the hardest rooms to engage right now. I mean, like, you know, lasers are pretty good at shooting down group three drones, but you have to keep your laser on target for five to 15 seconds in order to do damage to to the airframe. So, we are we are perfectly positioned for the group one, group two threat. Now, that said, we can shoot down group one drones very very far away. And so if I can hit a seven inch target on a group one drone very very far away, I can hit very vulnerable parts of a shahed

at the same distances.

So while we're not the ideal solution for engaging those those larger targets, you know, you have road runners and other things that can go out a little bit farther. You're going to want to hit them 20 to 15 km away. But when they get closer and you need that last line of defense,

we are absolutely a great solution for taking those out of the air.

Talk about scaling manufacturing. Like it it doesn't look like you manufacture the truck. It doesn't look like you manufacture the actual gun, but there's a whole system that creates the Bullfrog product. Uh what is the act what's actually going on that you can share in the manufacturing process? Is it milling different parts to fit things together? uh just uh you know integration of different systems. How are you thinking about scaling manufacturing?

You know we um when we built Bullfrog you know the hardware was not the exquisite part of the system.

Mhm.

We built Bullfrog incredibly well. We we built it so it will could be easily maintained and we built it so it'd be easily manufactured and scaled very quickly. And that's one of the other differentiators that we have against the other counter US solutions that are out there is we can get to thousands of units really really fast.

And the way we do that is 90% of Bullfrog is made from basically commercial off-the-shelf components.

Sure.

Standard things that you see in a in a robust supply chain with multiple vendors that can quickly get us to the amount of inventory that we need to start pumping out a thousand of these every single month.

Talk a little bit about the compute. I mean, you're doing image recognition. It seems like there's a camera there. Is that all done on device? Is there a need for edge compute, a need for cloud computing or because I imagine this is designed to operate in off-grid scenarios effectively, right?

Yeah, 100%. It it has to be a completely self-contained compute system

in order to do something autonomously. Think about an unmanned ground vehicle or an unmanned surface vessel. Yeah.

So having a fully autonomous system like Bullfrog out on those platforms that can be asynchronously tracking targets and just waiting for an operator to say engage that target is a huge advantage when you start talking about operationalizing unmanned payloads. And that is another kind of huge niche that we have or that we're that we're going after right now.

Yeah.

How big is the team these days?

Uh we are approaching 250 today.

Wow.

Um and I I I don't know where we started of the year, but I think it was like 80. Last I heard we were hiring about 50 people a month. Um you know, we are we are trying to drag in the absolute best engineering talent possible. You know, one way that we look at kind of differentiating ourselves in the industry is is, you know, you have the Andals and they're doing a great job of finding companies and doing rollups, but I think they're losing a lot of their technical depth.

And so, we're really focused on building a really, really core engineering team that understands robotics. And robotics is an incredible symphony of detailed, you know, integration between hardware and software to do it well. And and and we think that we can really differentiate ourselves in the future as we talk about bringing on more products to solve defense needs with robotics.

That makes sense.

Little shots fired there from the Bullfrog chief himself.

Company that shoots shots.

Really, really impressive progress. Uh

tell us another round.

Yeah.

How much did you raise?

We raised $200 million at a $2 billion pre- money valuation.

Woo. Let's go. Hit that guy. I can say our series a presentation. He's a part of this.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

We should we should share that presentation at some point.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's crazy. Right. Right before like pre pre-TBPN,

I had the pleasure of uh helping you guys kind of position uh what you're working on and uh you guys have executed it the the strategy to a tea. So, it's awesome to see. going to keep going. It's It's really exciting. We think you guys will see another big announcement in the next 12 to 18 months. So,

congratulations.

Looking forward to seeing you again. Cheers, Mike. Congrats to the team.

Have a good rest of your day.