Defense Unicorns bags $136 million in funding to deliver secure military software updates – News

Warfighting software delivery startup Defense Unicorns Inc. said today it has raised $136 million in a new funding round that pushes its valuation past the $1 billion mark, making it an official “unicorn” in more than just its name.

The Series B round was led by Bain Capital’s Tech Opportunities Fund and saw participation from a host of other investors, including Ansa Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, AVP and Uncorrelated Ventures, as well as the retired U.S. Army general and former Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus.

Founded in 2021, Defense Unicorns joins a small but growing club of defense technology startups that have bagged unicorn status. The company is the developer of an open-source and air-gapped software delivery platform that allows military personnel to deploy modern code and updates in the disconnected and contested environments where they operate. Its platform is used by multiple services, including the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force as a vehicle for delivering updates to mission-critical systems that traditionally lag far behind commercial software.

Defense Unicorns is addressing a critical infrastructure gap, enabling the military to deliver rapid software updates securely across disconnected systems, including ships, submarines, aircraft and other vehicles, as well as military bases. It’s an important capability because the armed forces tend to operate in environments where connectivity is spotty or nonexistent, yet the ability to deploy software updates can be critical to its operational success.

In a statement, Defense Unicorns co-founder and Chief Executive Rob Slaughter said the round underscores how his company’s platform has become a strategic necessity for the military, as opposed to something that’s just nice to have. “Defense Unicorns gives our nation a wartime software advantage,” he said. “The U.S. has significant commercial software advantages, but the systems we go to war with are typically outdated. At Defense Unicorns, we make software a strategic deterrent by making it easy to deploy and operate software in any mission environment.”

The startup’s flagship platform is the Unicorn Delivery Service or UDS, which is a secure and portable system for delivering software into classified and disconnected networks. In addition, it sells UDS Army and UDS Registry platforms, which are designed to standardize secure DevSecOps pipelines across Army systems and reduce the friction involved in digital innovation.

Bain Capital Partner Dewey Awad said he’s backing Defense Unicorns because of the growing importance that software systems play in military readiness. “Defense Unicorns plays a vital role in helping the military to modernise mission systems, enabling capabilities that directly improve readiness, resilience and operational advantage in the field,” he said.

The defense technology industry is getting a lot of attention from venture capital investors nowadays as the world’s militaries scramble to modernize their warfighting capabilities. Just one day earlier, the Paris-based startup Harmattan AI secured $200 million in funding from the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation SA to develop autonomous drones for surveillance, reconnaissance and interception operations. That came after rival autonomous drone operators Shield AI Inc. and Mach Industries Inc. raised $240 million and $100 million, respectively, last summer.

Other prominent defense tech industry startups include Hadrian Automation Inc., which raised $260 million in July to accelerate automation in the aerospace and weapons manufacturing industries, and the procurement technology firm Pryzm Dynamics Inc., which received $12.2 million in seed funding last month.

Image: Defense Unicorns