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With more cash and a launch, Vannevar Labs is reconnecting Silicon Valley to its defense industry roots
Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, the region has been known far less for silicon and defense than for the consumer internet products of Google, Facebook and Netflix.
A small number of startups, though, are attempting to revitalize that important government-industry nexus as the rise of China pushes more defense planners in Washington to double down on America’s technical edge. Vannevar Labs is one of this new crop, and it has hit some new milestones in its quest to displace traditional defense contractors with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial acumen.
I last chatted with the company just as it was debuting in late 2019, having raised a $4.5 million seed. The company has been quiet and heads down the past two years as it developed a product and traction within the defense establishment. Now it’s ready to reveal a bit more of what all that work has culminated in.
First, the company officially launched its Vannevar Decrypt product in January of this year. It’s focused on foreign language natural language processing, organizing overseas data and resources that are collected by the intelligence community and then immediately translating and interpreting those documents for foreign policy decisionmakers. CEO and co-founder Brett Granberg said that the product “went from one deployment to a dozen adoptions.”
Second, the company raised a $12 million Series A investment in May from Costanoa Ventures and Point72, with General Catalyst participating. Costanoa and GC co-led the startup’s seed round.
Finally, the company has been on a hiring spree. The team has grown into a crew of 20 employees, and the firm last week brought on Scott Sanders to lead business development. Sanders was one of the earliest employees at Anduril, and had spent several years at the company. Vannevar also added to its board John Doyle, a long-time Palantir employee who was head of its national security business, according to Granberg. Today, the team is equally split between national security folks and technologists, and he says that the team is set to double this year.
Co-founders Nini Moorhead and Brett Granberg of Vannevar Labs. Photo via Vannevar Labs.
With a few years of hindsight, Granberg says that he has refined what he considers the best model for defense tech startups to break into the hardscrabble market at the Pentagon and across Northern Virginia.
First, there needs to be incredible focus on getting access to actual end users and learning their work. The functions that defense and intelligence personnel perform are completely different from operations in the commercial economy, and trying to translate what works at a large corporation into defense is a fool’s errand. “You need to have both the DNA of understanding new technology and the DNA of deeply understanding a lot of different use cases within DoD,” Granberg said, referencing the Department of Defense.
That has directly informed how Decrypt has developed over time. “We started focusing on the counter-terrorism space, and as the government moved away from counter-terrorism, we started moving to the foreign actors that were important,” he said. “Once we have our first couple of deployments, we are able to iterate very, very quickly.”
He also strongly eschews a popular view in defense procurement circles that there are “dual-use” technologies that can be used equally well in commercial and defense applications. “Some of the most important mission problems where the government spends the most money and has the most interest,” he explained, are also contexts where commercial off-the-shelf products (dubbed COTS in the industry parlance) are least useful. He says startups targeting defense simply cannot split their bandwidth by also trying to learn commercial use cases.
In fact, he went so far to predict that “you are going to see a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money that will fizzle out in the coming years” because they just can’t nail the dual-use model well.
Second, he argues that defense tech startups need to move beyond the model that each company should work on one platform, and instead move to an organizational model where a company offers multiple products to reach scale. Each product has the potential to reach “a couple of hundred million in revenue,” according to Granberg, but it is hard to expand a company’s size if it doesn’t parallelize product development.
To that end, Granberg said that he pushes Vannevar Labs to always be exploring new product lines for growth. “Decrypt is our first product [but]10% of our energy is in new product efforts,” he said. “I can imagine when we are three to four years down the line… it might be nine-10 products.” He said that the one platform approach might have worked for Palantir, which ironically, is the major winner in the defense tech space the last few years. But newer companies like Anduril and Shield AI have been designed around product line expansion.
Finally, noting those other companies, Granberg believes there is something of a collective benefit as each startup makes headway in the defense sector. “There is this theory in our space that we don’t view ourselves as competitors — if one of us does well, we all do well,” he said. Given the varied mission requirements of different agencies and the absolute massive scale of budgets in this field, startups actually have a lot of independent terrain to explore, even if they come up against the big legacy defense contractors on a regular basis.
As for Vannevar Labs, its next goal is to turn its Decrypt product into a program of record, which would guarantee it a certain level of sales and revenue for potentially years into the future. That’s a huge bar to leap, but would be a turning point in the company’s long-term trajectory.
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Inside the history of Silicon Valley labor, with Louis Hyman
As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here.
So when I was moved to tears a few weeks ago, on seeing footage of groups of 18 Jewish protestors link arms to block the entrances to ICE detention facilities, bearing banners reading “Never Again” in reference to the Holocaust — these mostly young women risking their physical freedom and safety to try to help the children this country’s immigration service is placing in concentration camps today, one of my first thoughts was: I can’t cover that for my TechCrunch column. It’s about ethics of course, but not about tech.
It turns out that wasn’t correct. Immigration is a tech issue. In fact, companies such as Wayfair (furniture), Amazon (web services), and Palantir (the software used to track undocumented immigrants) have borne heavy criticism for their support of and partnership with ICE’s efforts under the current administration.
And as I discussed earlier this month with Jaclyn Friedman, a leading sex ethics expert and one of the ICE protestors arrested in a major demonstration in Boston, social media technology has been instrumental in building and amplifying those protests.
But there’s more. IBM, for example, has an unfortunate and dark history of support for Nazi extermination efforts, and many recent commentators have drawn parallels between what IBM did during the Holocaust and what companies like Palantir are beginning to do now.
Dozens of protestors huddle in the rain outside Palantir HQ.
I say “companies,” plural, with intention: immigrant advocacy organization Mijente recently released news that Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey and composed of Palantir veterans, now has a $13.5 million contract with the Marine corps for their autonomous surveillance “Lattice” towers at four different USMC bases, including one border base. Documents procured via the Freedom of Information Act show the Marines mention “the intrusion dilemma” in their justification for choosing Anduril.
So now it seems the kinds of surveillance tech we know are badly biased at best — facial recognition? Panopticon-style observation? Algorithms of various other kinds — will be put to work by the most powerful fighting force ever designed, for expanded intervention into our immigration system.
Will the Silicon Valley elite say “no”? To what extent will new protests emerge, where the sorts of people likely to be reading this writing might draw a line and make work more difficult for their peers at places like Anduril?
Maybe the problem, however, is that most of us think of immigration ethics as an issue that might touch on a small handful of particularly libertarian-leaning tech companies, but surely it doesn’t go beyond that, right? Can’t the average techie in San Francisco or elsewhere safely and accurately say these problems don’t actually implicate them?
Turns out that’s not right either.
Which is why I had to speak this week with Cornell University historian Louis Hyman. Hyman is a Professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Director of the ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies, in New York. In our conversation, Hyman and I dig into Silicon Valley’s history with labor rights, startup work structures and the role of immigration in the US tech ecosystem. Beyond that, I’ll let him introduce himself and his extraordinary work, below.
Louis Hyman. (Image by Jesse Winter)
Greg Epstein: I discovered your work via a piece you wrote in the Washington Post, which drew from your 2018 book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. In it, you wrote, “Undocumented workers have been foundational to the rise of our most vaunted hub of innovative capitalism: Silicon Valley.”
And in the book itself, you write at one point, “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says “robot,” simply picture a woman of color. Instead of self-aware robots, workers—all women, mostly immigrants, sometimes undocumented—hunched over tables with magnifying glasses assembling parts, sometimes on a factory line and sometimes on a kitchen table. Though it paid a lot of lip service to automation, Silicon Valley truly relied upon a transient workforce of workers outside of traditional labor relations.”
Can you just give us a brief introduction to the historical context behind these kinds of comments?
Louis Hyman: Sure. One of the key questions all of us ask is why is there only one Silicon Valley. There are different answers for that.
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