What Four Investments Taught Me About Defense Tech Before I Knew I Was Learning It

Last week I was asked to co-chair the Defense, Intelligence and Aerospace Special Interest Group at the Band of Angels, alongside Rick Lu of Pacific Defense.

How did I get here?

One day you're an angel investor writing about industrial software, robotics and startup mechanics, the next you're co-chairing a group that vets seed-stage defense deals.

Aside from occansional writings about military doctrine and satellites, it was only in going back through my portfolio to think about what I'd bring to the DIA SIG that I noticed four investments over the last several years that, at the time, I would not have filed under "defense tech." I filed them under "great technical team, differentiated tech, real customer pain." All four shared a second property: every one of them builds something a commercial customer needs and that a military customer needs for the same underlying reason.

Geosite built geospatial intelligence and property-risk analytics, the kind of thing an insurer needs to price risk on a piece of land, and the kind of thing an intelligence analyst needs to understand what's happening on that same piece of land. Descartes Labs, which does a substantial amount of work with the geospatial intelligence community, acquired the company in April 2024, and both were in turn acquired by Earth Daily Analytics (EDA).

Metalware is building security for firmware for the operators who build and run it, which turns out to be exactly what the Department of Defense and its suppliers need when they think about their own systems infrastructure. The company has been doing work for government primes on its way into direct DoD relationships.

Okapi Orbits is the clearest version of the pattern. As the number of satellites in orbit keeps climbing, someone has to manage the traffic and avoid the collisions. This is a space domain awareness problem for every commercial satellite operator and for every government that operates satellites of its own. The company raised a 13M seed round in 2025 to build that infrastructure.

Nobility Space builds air-breathing electric propulsion for satellites operating in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), altitudes low enough for most spacecraft to sustain orbit. The promise of VLEO is enticing: sharper imagery, faster communications links, more frequent revisit rates, and a harder target to track. VLEO is naturally attractive for persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and space domain awareness called out in the U.S. Space Force doctrine in April 2025. 

These are companies where the underlying technical problem is the same problem, viewed from two markets with different sales cycles, procurement processes, and risk tolerances. 

It is also the underlying theme of most of what I've written about military doctrine, innovation, and space over the years, including a piece I wrote in December on the Pentagon's Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) model, where individual PAEs are given combined financial and product authority over a mission portfolio and are judged, as I put it then, not by compliance metrics but by "how quickly solutions are delivered, how relevant they are."