Series A

Today, we are pleased to announce a $10.5M Series A investment by Andreessen Horowitz. We are humbled to have their support. This investment allows us to accelerate the development and deployment of artificially intelligent products that will save lives. 

Our mission is to protect service members and innocent civilians with artificially intelligent systems.  We serve this mission for the people who put themselves in harm's way to help others; and the innocent people, who find themselves tragically impacted by the dire circumstances of conflict.  We believe that the speed and accuracy of both information collection and analysis afforded by artificially intelligent systems to be the single most powerful force for protecting these people, and advancing security and stability in the world.

Shield AI was founded to address the challenges faced by Brandon during his combat experiences in Afghanistan. He witnessed tragic events when information was unavailable, or unintelligible. When Brandon shared his stories of loss, and inspiring vision of artificially intelligent machines that would save lives, Andrew and I left our jobs to join Brandon and co-found Shield AI. 

Accomplishing this mission will not be easy. Worthwhile endeavors never are. We’ve got an incredible team of world-class engineers that work relentlessly to support the community we serve and a great group of investors that believe in our team and mission. We have a long way to go and a lot to prove, but our experiences over the last 18 months have left me optimistic that we are on a trajectory to build an incredible capability that will protect millions of people.

- Ryan

Liftoff

We’re excited to announce the launch of Shield AI. We recently closed our second round of funding; a $2 million round with Homebrew (seed VC in Cruise), Bloomberg Beta (Michael Bloomberg's VC fund), and Founder Collective (seed VC in Uber) and we wanted to share with you more about our mission, our product, and our team.

Shield AI’s mission is to protect service members and innocent civilians with artificially intelligent systems. It’s a mission our team and our investors strongly support. We are empowering service members with better information, so they can make the best possible decisions and make battlefields much safer.

We build an autonomous micro-UAV companion for every Soldier, Marine, and Special Operator (Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Air Force Combat Controllers, etc.). Launched from a distance it has the ability to reach inaccessible areas like urban canyons, indoor spaces, and other GPS-denied environments. Collecting intelligence along the way, it resolves critical information deficiencies related to targeting, building clearances, and urban combat.

Ryan and I worked on several different “startups” growing up ranging from consolidating newspaper routes to building a jet pack and are pumped to be working together again. We met Andrew through MIT and connected instantly. We knew Andrew would be great when we visited him in Boston and saw the awesomeness that is his personally built robot collection. Together, we founded Shield AI because we are passionate about robotics, artificial intelligence, and want to support DoD ground forces, which are under-served by tech companies today. Since founding, we've added incredible engineers to the team with experiences at Draper, Qualcomm, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brain Corp, and SPAWAR with backgrounds from MIT, Stanford, UCSD, and Caltech. 

We believe robotics and AI will have a transformative impact on the world over the next several years. If you’re an engineer who, like us, gets excited about cutting edge engineering like multi-robot collaboration, advanced human-machine teaming, and deep learning; who wants to make the world a better place, and who is interested in supporting those who protect us; we’re filling out our core team and want to hear from you!

-Brandon