This week, America put its military arsenal on full display — sinking Iranian warships, neutralizing thousands of missiles and drones, and executing strikes on a scale few thought possible. It was a reminder that our technological superiority is still unmatched.
Behind that firepower is both a legacy arsenal decades in the making and a new generation of defense technology — built by Silicon Valley companies that are committed to the national interest.
That’s partly thanks to Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch, whose American Dynamism Fund, launched inside Andreessen Horowitz in 2022, was built on the conviction that investing in defense, aerospace, and manufacturing isn’t just inherently valuable and patriotic. It’s also good business.
In California’s deep-blue Bay Area that idea was deeply unfashionable. Just a few years earlier, Google had pulled out of Project Maven, a Pentagon contract to help analyze drone footage, after thousands of employees signed a petition objecting to military work.
“We were sort of the lone crew of people saying these things are important,” Boyle told me. “Founders were told there’s no reason to build in those categories — no one’s going to back you if you want to build a defense company or an aerospace company.”
Fast forward four years and defense tech is arguably one of the hottest sectors in venture capital, with companies like SpaceX commanding an estimated valuation of $1.75 trillion, Anduril worth $60 billion, and Palantir with a nearly $370 billion market cap.
Boyle, a former journalist who cold-emailed Peter Thiel to break into the industry, teamed up with David Ulevitch, who sold his cloud-based security company to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. Fittingly, the two had met while both vying to invest in Anduril’s Series B.
Last month they closed a second fund, bringing their total raised to $1.176 billion. Other recent investments include Chariot Defense, which is focused on power architecture for the battlefield, and Heron Power, which is working to update power grids with cutting edge tech.
This week, they brought together the top names in tech, government and venture — with speakers including Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michaels, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, White House AI advisor Sriram Krishnan, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, President and Vice Chairman at Meta Dina Powell McCormick, and a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz — at their 4th annual American Dynamism summit in Washington, D.C. Attendance by top government officials — JD Vance spoke last year — was understandably muted given the ongoing strikes against Iran.
The fund’s purview has grown to include investing in space tech, energy, minerals, mining, and battery production. American Dynamism now back public safety technology companies where AI can translate a 911 call in real time or dispatch a drone to an emergency situation before cops can arrive. Their manufacturing bets on robotics and automation are making it possible to bring production back to the United States at scale.
“You can’t have strong national security without space domain dominance,” Ulevitch said of how they’re all interlinked. “You can’t have a strong defense without reliable energy.”
Several things precipitated the changing attitudes toward defense tech — a change in administration, yes, but also the recognition of supply chain vulnerabilities during Covid, the wake-up call that war wasn’t going anywhere after Russia invaded Ukraine, and, most importantly, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
“Silicon Valley had this horrible period from around 2010 through the Covid era where people were way too afraid to say the real thing,” Boyle said. “And then Elon bought Twitter, and people realized we do have free speech in this country.”
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Boyle and Ulevitch see speaking candidly about their beliefs as a responsibility that comes with their platform.
“If you are afraid to talk about your ideas, if you’re afraid to say the truth in this industry, you don’t deserve the perch — you shouldn’t be here,” Boyle said. “Palmer Luckey doesn’t want to work with an empty suit.”
“If you talk to founders that work with us, I think they’ll tell you that we always give it to them straight,” Ulevitch added. “I think the worst thing that investors can do is not give the truth to a founder.”
Last month, Ulevitch was one of the first voices to call out the Brooklyn Navy Yard for declining to renew the lease of Easy Aerial, a defense startup that works with US and Israeli military forces. “It’s totally insane that a place called the Brooklyn Navy Yard — which was used to build naval warships, to support our war efforts — would end the lease of a company that supports first responders,” he said on X.
The fund also made headlines when it hired Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who was acquitted in the chokehold death of a homeless man on an NYC subway. “He works constantly,” Boyle said of Penny who was brought on as a deal partner at the firm. “He has contributed so much to our team — and he comes from a different perspective. That’s something we’re always looking for: people who have that hustle, who have demonstrated some act of courage, some act of conviction.”
The qualities they see in Penny — initiative, courage, conviction — are the same ones they’re finding in a new class of founders moving away from apps and consulting toward something harder and more tangible.
“There’s something about this generation that loves their country, that wants to put in the hours, that wants to do the hard work,” Boyle told me of the founders they are investing in. “The culture has shifted. Young people love this country again. It’s not going away.”
