defense startups

Virginia Beach‑based Kilsar develops the AI‑powered Orion platform to digitize maintenance training and predictive repair, capturing tribal knowledge for aviation and other sectors.

Palo Alto‑based ItsWare offers an IoT asset tracking platform using tags, cabinets and software to manage high‑value tools, led by CEO Casey Spencer.

West Midlands company bringing Agrointelli’s Robotti autonomous tractor to the UK. Founded by Tom Beach and Jack Wyatt, offers Robot-as-a-Service to modernize British agriculture.

Data-centric AI platform enabling programmatic labeling and training data creation. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Ratner and Stanford researchers in Redwood City, raised about $135M to help enterprises accelerate AI adoption.

SpaceX builds reusable rockets and spacecraft to reduce spaceflight costs and enable Mars colonization; founded 2002 by Elon Musk and headquartered in Hawthorne, California.

Databricks is a data, analytics, and AI company founded in 2013 in San Francisco. It pioneered the data lakehouse architecture and offers cloud-based tools for unified data analytics.

Radical AI is pioneering materials R&D with AI, using generative models and self-driving labs to accelerate discovery.

Hadrian builds vertically integrated, semi‑autonomous precision factories for aerospace and defense, enabling on‑demand production of high‑mix, low‑volume parts.

Aalo Atomics develops factory-manufactured small-scale nuclear reactors. Founded in 2022 in Austin, Texas, the startup aims to deliver 50 MWe modular Aalo Pod reactors for data centers and microgrids, targeting 3¢ per kWh.

Cerebras Systems develops wafer-scale AI accelerator chips and compute systems. Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman and cofounders, the Sunnyvale company builds Wafer Scale Engine chips powering AI supercomputers.

Syntiant designs ultra-low-power neural network processors for always-on voice and sensor inference. Founded in 2017 and based in Irvine, CA, it has raised funding from Intel, Microsoft and Amazon to enable edge AI.