CHAOS Industries, a Hawthorne-based intelligence and security technology startup, announced in early May that it raised $275 million in series C funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Accel, with additional participation by Overmatch Ventures, StepStone Group, Valor Equity Partners and Tru Arrow Partners.
The company has raised $490 million since its inception in 2022 and is now valued at $2 billion, given CHAOS Industries raised a whopping $145 million in series B funding just six months earlier, according to Forbes magazine.
CHAOS Industries develops sensing platforms geared towards military operations. Its suite of sensors and effectors, known as the coherent distributed networks, includes products like the Vanquish radar, which is meant to detect and track missiles, aircrafts and other aerial systems that are unmanned.
Big year for security startup funding
Amid ongoing geopolitical tensions, 2024 was a banner year for wartime and national security device startup funding, according to PitchBook. The sector raised just over $183 million last year. So far this year, CHAOS Industries’ recent fundraising round is the largest in this space.
“CHAOS has architected a sensing and command infrastructure that addresses one of the most persistent asymmetries in modern defense – the cost, complexity and fragility of traditional detection systems,” said Scott Sandell, executive chairman and chief investment officer at New Enterprise Associates, in a statement.
“Their architecture unlocks new capabilities in distributed sensing, network coherence, and system survivability,” he said. “By solving a hard systems problem at the intersection of signal coherence, time synchronization, and distributed autonomy, CHAOS enables new operational doctrine and battlefield utility.”
CHAOS Industries was founded by a handful of military technology executives. This includes John Tenet, a former partner at 8VC and co-founder of Torrance-based Epirus (a software platform also dedicated to wartime uses); Bo Marr, former Epirus executive and technology lead at Raytheon; Gavin Hood, a former head at Palantir Technologies and counsel lead at the UK Security and Intelligence Agencies; and Brett Cummings, former advisor at 8VC.
