Zane Mountcastle and Martin Slosarik spent years in the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center developing advanced sensors and autonomous systems for the U.S. Department of Defense.
For all their complexity, the toughest challenge wasn’t developing these systems – it was integrating them into the existing military networks and command systems soldiers were already trained to use.
“We realized two things early on,” Mountcastle, Slosarik and Dan Chirita said via email. “One, that integration can be solved as a product. We can build infrastructure to accelerate the integration of new sensors, drones, robotics, weapons systems, AI tools, and command systems into real world military missions. Two, that the infrastructure must be neutral.”
In 2020, that’s what they did. Mountcastle and Slosarik, along with Chirita, founded Picogrid, an El Segundo-based defense tech company. The startup announced in late May that it raised $45 million in series A funding in order to expand its product line of vendor-agnostic integration components for the military. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with additional participation from several existing investors such as El Segundo-based Starburst Ventures, Credo Ventures and Giant Step Capital.
‘Autonomous systems proliferate’
In El Segundo, Picogrid is a software-focused defense company neighbored by several hard tech startups racing to develop advanced technology with increasingly specific use cases. The growing number of hardware startups only makes Picogrid more necessary – integration is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for the Defense Department as it continues to pour billions of dollars in funding to the development and testing of cutting-edge hardware. Efforts to build these new sensors, drones and artificial intelligence models are futile, if at the end of the day, they cannot fit seamlessly into clunky but reliable military networks that workers have been using for years.
“As autonomous systems proliferate across every domain, there’s clear demand for an infrastructure layer that’s hardware-agnostic and interoperable,” David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said in a statement. “Picogrid has built the connective tissue that lets disparate military systems communicate to one another, and it is being used in the field today.”
Today, Picogrid’s vendor-agnostic approach has net it more than 100 customers in the defense world, from legacy companies like Northrop Grumman Corp., to new entrants like El Segundo-based CX2 Inc. and Torrance-based Neros Inc.
