In its aerial race to be the top dog among autonomous military hardware and software startups, Shield AI Inc. has just secured an additional $165 million from the likes of Snowpoint Ventures, which led this round of funding alongside Riot Ventures, Homebrew, and Disruptive. Its newly lined pockets now give the San Diego-based Shield AI a whopping $2.3 billion valuation, a necessity in its pursuit to build thriving drone hardware and sophisticated AI cockpit software ecosystem.
The new round of funding comes in the form of $75 million in debt and $90 million in Series E equity and comes off the heels of the firm's $210-$300 million Series D, which took place less than a year ago and was led by none other than Disruptive. Homebrew, too, remains an avid investor in Shield AI, cementing the firm's potential success with its initial seed round, but of most interest getting in the action is Snowpoint's Doug Philippone, who has run Palantir's global defense sector for the past 14 years.
The startup has been making steady strides over the past several years, witnessed in the Shield AI acquisition of Martin UAV back in July 2021 and not mere days prior also scooped up Heron Systems. Shield AI is best known for its Hivemind autonomy stack, cited as "A Top Gun for every aircraft" on its website, which utilizes mapping, path-planning, computer-vision algorithms, and state-estimation in unmanned systems for a wide array of military use cases. Under its wing is also a highly sophisticated VTOL drone called the V-BAT, offering up to 11 hours of flight time and carries a max capacity of 25 pounds.
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In addition to the technology underpinning the startup, the Shield AI board of directors too is stacked with some important names, including Andrew Berlin of Berlin Packaging and 33-year Navy veteran Brian Losey, who in a 2019 blog post said, "Shield AI embodies big thinking, big goals, and a big mission which is imminently attainable." The startup's own president and co-founder, Brandon Tseng, is likewise a former Navy SEAL along with his brother, who is acting CEO.
As one may guess, most of the internal on-paper dealings remain incredibly classified, but they are mostly utilized on the part of the US Department of Defense's Program of Record. Its Hivemind AI software and the Nova drone have been in use since 2018, but in what capacity remains top secret. On the current menu in terms of tech research and development under Shield AI is swarming parameters for its line of hardware, allowing drones and other assorted AI software to run in tandem, not unlike previous examples seen recently via researchers at Zhejiang University.
But Shield AI is not the only one making headwaves in the autonomous military flight space, as evidenced in the likes of Andruil, which recently took home a $7 billion valuation on the heels of a $1.2 billion funding round. Led by Oculus VR founder and designer of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, Andruil is at the forefront of military-industrial technology, building out an open AI-powered operating system, called LatticeOS, for defense necessities.
Shield AI, on the other hand, wants to amend its reach and build out systems not solely for the present and future but well further in advance. In a Dec. 2021 blog post, president Tseng writes:
"At the Air Force Association's 2021 Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall stated: "2027 is when China will reach parity with the US." Applying this logic, 2028 must be when China will surpass the US if no bold actions are taken to prevent this."
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