Tracer emerges from stealth with $25M seed to build the first subterranean defense tech company

data generalize? Is are they just going to learn how to play Fortnite? And it's like well there is a farming simulator and there's a you know

data center data center simulator. Happy bar central banking simulator. potential banking simulator. It's going to learn everything. Well, well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Uh, Yadin Suffer from Tra, the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hey guys, nice to meet you. I'm great. How are you?

You thank you so much.

What's happening?

Introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building. Tell us about the emergence from stealth that's happening today.

Yeah. Well, Yodin Sofer, we last week we announced the launch of Tracer,

which is I would say the first of its kind subterror defense tech company

and uh subterror is a word we actually coined, but I've been happy to see people reference it on X already. It refers to everything in the subterranean defense domain. So that's everything in the intersection between military applications for things that happen beneath our feet.

What is the history of subterranean startups? So you have the Boring Company. Uh Palmer has talked about the domain. I don't think he coined it. So you get all the credit.

Um but but what what have been some historical sort of just like general efforts in the category maybe outside of the Boring Company?

Yeah, I think on the civilian front actually subterranean is it's a developed industry. You know, there's a lot of applications in the mining world and in the piping world, in the utility world where, you know, it it deserves some loves and and it did get. You got amazing companies like Herk that are not, you know,

sexy startups like the Boring Company, but these are decades old German companies that have been u you know, piercing the way, pun intended, in everything underground. So I would say that in the civilian front there's a lot of innovation happening but in the defense front I don't think you'll find any. I mean we we really have not seen any any companies in this space.

What are the primary challenges of you know underground drones the underground domain overall? Is it connectivity?

Uh but what what are they?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think uh it's interesting because uh the folks our engineering team come from a combination of the Boring Company and SpaceX and usually you see them kind of jumping between those two companies and they have an interesting saying that says that you know everyone calls rocket science rocket science as if it's the hardest thing in the world but when it comes to air you know what forces you're dealing with right you know you know what you're dealing with and when you're working on the underground when you're essentially boring your own uh you don't know what to expect you don't the ge ology, composition, you can have a high sense of how it's going to look, but when you're down there in the dirt, you don't know if suddenly you hit hard rock and you hit something else and you need to know to either maneuver very precisely or to be able to replace your cutter head to something that can fit. So, I would say that is probably the number one challenge, just the uncertainty of this domain.

Uh, Palmer talks about this. He says diameter is expensive, length is free, something along those lines. Can you explain that concept and how it informs uh vehicle design for the subterranean domain?

Yeah. No, it's such a great point and I think a lot of people looking at this space are thinking the same thing, right? We're we're thinking a train where it bores its own path and it takes behind it essentially infinite payload, right? You can have miles and miles of payload of sensors of effects and you know the dream is someday people. Now, when you think about it, when you're increasing the diameter, you need to remove so much more dirt, right? You're dealing with a lot more. And when you work at a at a small diameter and essentially infinite length, you you could even condense the dirt to the sides. You don't necessarily need to remove it. And that becomes extremely valuable. So, most of the questions are around that. And I don't know if you guys have seen a boring site, but a boring site is this massive thing, right? you need the bentonite to mix with the dirt to take back outside. It's like a whole thing. But when you're working on small diameter, you don't necessarily even need to remove the dirt. You can just condense into the sides. And I think that's a big part of, you know, going sort of slim and long.

$25 million seed round. What's the goal? The government isn't actively buying this technology. There isn't a program of record that you can sneak into, I imagine. So, what does the next two years look like? Yeah, we we always say this that, you know, if you if you try to find the line items, they're like line items buried in line items, right? Obviously, we have penetration munitions, but those are air air drop bombs, and we're not looking to compete with Boeing. But I would say the the interesting points and the slivers we see of interest from the government right now are in um there was a recent RFI by DARPA where they're looking for new methods to induce collapse in underground uh infrastructure using uh different shockwave uh methods. So essentially, we're looking at this as non-kinetic penetration munitions, right? Our ability to insert a payload underground. This doesn't have to be uh dropped from air. It can be done by a special uh special forces on the ground and essentially detonate a payload in a sequence that induces collapse of facilities like in Iran. So, you know, I think the military is starting to understand that the existing solutions do not deliver what we need them to. So, they're starting to think differently. But back to the round, right? with $25 million here. Everyone goes to me and is like, "All right, you're building this massive R&D team. You're gonna have a ton of capex." And I'm like, "No, there is a lot of work to be done when Forming call it this category where we need government. We need the military to recognize this as a category like we do and essentially to go after large prototyping buckets that will then allow us to fund these long-term developments that we believe will allow us to win wars. So for us, most of the focus right now is just working with DC, working with the military and establish I would go as far as saying the subterrorct or the US subterror strategy for, you know, winning wars underground.

How far underground are you right now?

It does look like you're underground,

right? It looks deep. I was I was thinking about this, too. It's a good spot.

At least at least 20 ft. At least 20 feet.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the