DIB Innovators

Isaac Roberts spent four years in the Navy, built and sold a computer vision company, co-founded a robotics startup, and then joined Skyways to tackle the missing middle in autonomous aviation: long-range cargo drones big enough to matter but small enough to mass-produce. With a $37 million Air Force contract to reach full rate production, Skyways is building hybrid electric vertical take-off and...

Jonathan Sorensen went from working live events at Red Rocks and broadcast engineering for the Colorado Avalanche to solving military communication challenges at Clear-Com . As a Solutions Engineer for Military, Aerospace and Government, he brings a signal flow mindset to full duplex, real time comms built for high-stakes operations. Clear-Com's commercial business drives product development t...

The defense industrial base has no shortage of innovation. It has a scaling problem. At Hidden Level , the team went from building prototype passive RF sensors to producing operational systems at scale. The operational playbook behind that leap started when Antoinett Dufort joined as employee number 20. Now VP of Operations, Antoinett shares how she built manufacturing, supply chain, and quality s...

Space Copy builds ruggedized 3D printers that take in raw local materials, soil, sand, scrap metal, ceramics, even simulated moon dust, and print infrastructure on-site in the most extreme environments on Earth and in space. With 300 pre-orders, a NASA contract, and a planned lunar deployment by 2031, they are eliminating the need for external supply chains entirely. Madison Feehan , Founder and C...

Delta.g built a quantum gravity gradiometer that detects underground voids, tunnels, and buried targets in 200 milliseconds per reading, a capability conventional gravity sensors cannot match. Legacy tools are so sensitive to environmental noise that they require extended settling time to separate signal from background, and even then the gravitational reading can be indistinguishable from interfe...

Justin Smart has spent 30 years in additive manufacturing. Now at Impac Systems Engineering , he helps manufacturers adopt 3D printing for production-scale applications, including a continuous carbon fiber process that reduces an aerospace component's weight by 78% while matching the original's load capacity and vibration modulus. Justin tells Dave how photopolymers went from sun-sensitive...

How does a 20-year-old product spun out of a defense prime become a profitable, bootstrapped business in year one, all while staying fully open source? At OpenC3, it starts with refusing to charge for the core product and selling everything customers actually need to run it at enterprise scale. Greg Bonn , COO of OpenC3, tells Dave how the company's COSMOS platform went from automating benchto...

At Vendra, three operations engineers manage over 250 U.S. suppliers. A top competitor worth $5 billion needs one ops engineer for every two to three suppliers. The difference is a software layer that reads CAD files, matches parts to qualified shops, and orchestrates the full supply chain from quote to delivered hardware. Shan Mohta , Co-Founder and CEO of Vendra (YC S24), designed hardware at Mi...

Mike Benitez , CEO of Purple Rhombus , has built the Grackle™, an attritable Group 2 UAS, on a production model he claims can deliver 100,000 units a year using factories that already exist. Mike walks Dave through why most UAS companies can build prototypes fast but cannot scale, and how Purple Rhombus splits the airframe "truck" from a separate "missionization" layer for one-way attack, ISR, or...

Paige Craig built his first company by sneaking into Baghdad as a private citizen with a fake CNN badge, no government backing, and no contacts, starting with a $5,000 DARPA task and scaling to a $30M program within months. He sold that company and took everything he learned about operating in chaos into Outlander VC , where he writes the first check into founders before revenue, customers, or a r...

What does it take to scout 150 dual-use companies for the U.S. Army in six months when the existing process takes 10 to 12 months for a fraction of that volume? David Mroczka built the platform that did it, and the numbers are hard to argue with. 94% acceleration, 96% cost savings, and an eightfold lift on a process that fails 80 to 90 percent of the time. David Mroczka , Founder and CEO of AI Str...

The Keystone fire control module is weapon-agnostic from day one. Bryan Bockmon , CEO, President, & Chairman of AimLock , describes how the same edge computing system that directs a machine gun can be reconfigured for missiles, grenades, or lasers by rotating out effectors without rebuilding the platform. That modularity is a direct response to an increasingly common battlefield reality: adver...

Matt McElvogue , VP of Design at Teague , doesn't talk about design as a polish layer. He talks about it as a mission-critical failure point. His clearest example: a $5,000 tactical device used by JTAC operators for calling in 9-line bombing runs, where zeroizing the device was buried so deep in the menu that soldiers in the field resorted to shooting it or blowing it up. That failure isn'...

David Dickey , CEO, Founder, & Executive Search Consultant of Patriot Group , has seen it happen: an executive placed into a PE-backed defense company and a year later, the firm was contracting operations and pushing to sell. It wasn’t because of the market, but because the hire who looked great on paper couldn't actually lead. David has founded and exited aerospace and defense companies befor...

Coastal launch infrastructure is a strategic chokepoint that is one EW disruption off the Cape grounds US space ops, and bespoke responsive launch systems top out at a magazine depth of three. Jonathan Slavik , Co-Founder & CEO of Sagittarius Logistics , is building the orbital launch company incumbents structurally cannot become: designed from day one for payload handoffs measured in hours, n...

Jackson Moses , Founder and Managing Partner at Silent Ventures , spent a decade building companies before he started backing them. He founded Silent Ventures to invest exclusively at the pre-seed and seed stage in aerospace, defense, and national security, specifically because he believed most early-stage investors didn't understand what it actually took to survive inside the defense contract...

There are roughly 438 companies building propulsion systems for space right now. Nobody knows which ones actually perform. Philip Hover Smoot , CEO of Atlas Cup , is building a model to fix that, one that creates a capital pathway outside traditional defense funding, a proving ground for real on-orbit performance, and a non-government revenue stream for companies that need to survive long enough t...

Brook Leonard , CEO of Rogue Space Systems , spent 31 years in the Air Force, including as Chief of Staff of US Space Command. Today he is building the modular infrastructure layer that makes space operations faster, cheaper, and sustainable beyond a single mission. Brook breaks down why the current model (bespoke, fully integrated satellites that become debris) can't keep pace with the speed...

Jeff Crusey , General Partner at IceNine , has watched the same failure mode repeat across energy, defense, and deep tech: investors who don't understand the technology gain large ownership stakes and take companies off the rails. That pattern is what pushed him to launch IceNine, an early-stage venture firm built around first-principle technical depth and embedded government networks rather t...

Removing the pilot from an exquisite manned airframe doesn't make it expendable; it actually makes it more expensive to lose. James Gherdovich , Chief Strategy Officer at Grid Aero , argues that strapping a high-end autonomy suite onto a platform already limited by constrained supply chains only increases economic risk to the force in a kinetic environment.  Grid Aero's answer is a 40x40-f...

Australia and Anduril each put $50 million into Ghost Shark. That 50/50 split eliminated the customer-contractor power imbalance and got the vehicle in the water in 12 months, whereas the US Navy's ORCA program took nearly a decade to reach the same milestone. When Anduril couldn't solve biofouling on control surfaces, they walked into a design review and said it. The Australian government...

Adam Warmoth , Founder & CEO of Chariot Defense , fielded with the 101st Airborne at GRTC six months after first check by pulling silicon carbide power electronics and high-voltage lithium directly from Tesla and eVTOL supply chains. Their M424 hybridizes tactical vehicles and generators to deliver 4-5x higher charge rates than trucks alone, resulting in 3-5x drone sortie rates while almost el...

Galvion built a warfighter lab in Portsmouth, NH: a configurable shoot house with high-speed cameras, VR, 3D sound, and a double-PhD cognitive scientist on staff. Elite special operators ran the course with night vision and called their gear perfect, but the data showed they were slower, their muscles tighter, and compensating the entire time without knowing it. That gap between what a trained ope...

Will Edwards , CEO & Co-founder of Firehawk walked around defense conferences with what was essentially Lego plastic demonstrating it could become rocket fuel. Everyone laughed until Firehawk proved thermoplastic works as a binder for 3D-printable solid propellant, cutting production from 60 days to 6 hours. The breakthrough came from a failed pivot: they tried selling hybrid rocket engines to...

Zach Shore , President of Hermeus , and his team have demonstrated a turbine-based combined cycle engine in a wind tunnel for roughly $20 million. NASA and DARPA spent nine figures on the same architecture. The system uses proprietary modifications to an F100-229 to hit Mach 3, then routes airflow around the cocooned turbine directly into a ramjet to reach Mach 5. Reverse the process to decelerate...