When Jakob Diepenbrock started Discipulus Ventures, a hard-tech startup accelerator in El Segundo, he set out to identify a cohort of startup founders to build the next generation of “national interest” hardware and software – a vague cluster of industries that encompass the military, aerospace and manufacturing.

Some requirements to join the cohort welcome what most venture firms reject: founders who are still college students, who haven’t raised any capital, who still have full-time jobs, or who haven’t yet incorporated their nascent business. But while startup ideas can be vague and conceptual, Discipulus Ventures is very clear about what it looks for in founders.

On the company website, Discipulus Ventures touts that it values patriotism, religion and family, “ideals that once spurred innovation and societal growth” that have “since lost their appeal, particularly at academic institutions and top corporations.”

“In the past couple of years, right-wing people were probably more pro-American than left-wing people,” Diepenbrock said. “But I don’t think anything about what we say or what we stand for is innately only a right-wing thing.”

Diepenbrock isn’t alone in his views. El Segundo has become a compelling case study in the evolving tech ecosystem. Tech companies that once obfuscated local laws and viewed themselves as the nimble, high-tech solution to sluggish bureaucracy are increasingly intertwined with government agencies and their responsibilities, especially regarding wartime issues. At the same time, U.S. weapons manufacturers are increasingly falling behind what other nations are deploying on the battlefield, creating demand for new solutions.

Nathan Mintz has watched this evolution in real time. As the chief executive of El Segundo-based electronic warfare startup CX2 who has worked in the defense private sector for about 20 years.

“The big dinosaurs died off because they couldn’t adapt fast enough,” Mintz said, “and they were replaced by small nimble mammals.”

Resurrecting the wartime sector

When Diepenbrock was first introduced to El Segundo’s military tech scene, he noticed a phenomenon brewing in the South Bay that resembles his hometown in the Seattle area. Young tech workers at companies like Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. were moving on to create their own startups, contributing to the development of the region’s tech hub. The South Bay – a patchwork of manufacturing, weapons, and aerospace firms like Lockheed Martin Corp. and Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (known as SpaceX) – was producing a similar cohort of techies eager to shape the future of the ecosystem.

“Everybody there is there for a very strong, mission-focused cultural reason in that everybody who is there thinks what they’re building is the most important thing they can build for the country,” Diepenbrock said. “And that’s a very unifying mission.”

Discipulus’ graduates have received backing from prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Point72 Ventures. However, for a long time, venture firms shied away from investing in weapons and military technology. Like pornography and drugs, this sector was viewed as an inappropriate and controversial investment category by the firms’ limited partners, according to Sifted, a European startup media platform.

Consequently, decades-old aerospace and weapons companies have dominated the market with high-cost weapons that require a long production time. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine are engaged in battle using cheap consumer- grade drones Frankensteined into weapons with zip ties and duct tape.

“The incumbents are really focused on delivering very exquisite systems, very high end, lots of capability, but very high priced,” said Andrew Kreitz, co-founder of El Segundo-based weapons manufacturing firm Castelion. “And the focus and the muscle memory has not been in producing lots of efficient systems at scale. In terms of why these are so important, the Chinese have a substantial lead on us right now.”

Castelion, founded by three former SpaceX employees, secured $100 million in financing in February. The company isn’t only one. The defense and aerospace sector in Los Angeles has attracted $1.6 billion from venture firms so far in 2025, accounting for 15% of all defense funding in the U.S., according to PitchBook. In comparison, defense companies based in Silicon Valley received $493.5 million, less than half of what their neighbors in Southern California received.

The South Bay was once a major hub for the aerospace and defense industry, particularly the Cold War. After that, military spending dwindled and many of the buildings were converted into office spaces.

“In the last few years, all those former aerospace buildings that turn into, you know, makeup companies are transitioning back, and there’s a lot of new aerospace and defense firms springing up,” Kreitz said.

A partisan bent

Several factors are driving the Los Angeles’ resurgence as a military tech powerhouse, one of which is the growing right-wing tech community within El Segundo.

The philosophy follows the more conservative bend on titans of tech. After rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump, Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would abandon fact-checkers on its platforms, despite rampant, election-swaying misinformation flooding the platform during the 2016 and 2020 elections. Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX among other companies, also spearheaded the new government oversight initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A handful of tech executives from companies like Meta, OpenAI and Palantir have joined the U.S. Armed Forces.

“The moment where this crystallized was at the inauguration, where you had leaders from Google and OpenAI and Amazon and Meta, all seeming to show up to swear allegiance, effectively, to the new administration,” said Michael Karanicolas, former executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy.

“And on the one hand, it’s not surprising that they’re going to be a little bit opportunistic in looking out for their business interests and wanting to buddy up to whoever is in power. But there is certainly a disconnect that folks have noticed between the perception of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of liberalism and the apparent willingness of all these folks from the tech sector to sort of toe the line and meet administration demands,” he said.

Many of the startup founders at Discipulus Ventures are quite different from those that characterized Silicon Valley’s startup boom in the 2010s. This was a time when then-Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick faced a sexual harassment scandal; Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote a treatise on corporate women breaking the glass ceiling; and Google fired an employee for publishing an anti-diversity memo.

“I was surprised to see how many 20- to 23-year-old guys were talking about not just going to church on Sunday but daily mass. I’m like, wow, these guys are not just spiritually grounded, but I would say religiously grounded,” said Mintz, who was a guest speaker at Discipulus Ventures’ accelerator program. “It is a very different mentality than what we saw with the last generation of founders in Silicon Valley, where a lot of it was about hedonism and experimentation and sort of work hard, play hard.”

It may be impossible to avoid political values when dealing with the military industry – Mintz, a self-described conservative Jewish resident who ran for California’s State Assembly in 2012 as a Republican, said his personal values drive his business ambitions as a military tech founder.

“I have some embedded religious beliefs, and part of that is I’m a patriotic American who believes in American exceptionalism,” Mintz said.

Likewise, Diepenbrock says Discipulus Ventures focuses on founders with specific personal values because it targets early-stage company leaders who lack revenue or even a product to sell – similarly to how other early-stage venture firms emphasize the importance of seeking certain qualities in founders, even without a proof of concept.

“They’re going to be up for later nights, they’re going to be working harder, they are going to make it happen. I bet somebody who does care about this country will probably do a lot better in the long term,” Diepenbrock said. “So, I think that’s a very important part to us…That’s going to last a lot longer than somebody who’s just doing it because there’s probably some money to be made.”