Chaos Industries, the Hawthorne-based military intelligence startup, announced two funding milestones in September from the federal government.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a $10 million appropriation that would allow the military to experiment with developing a new radar system at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The appropriation is largely geared toward Chaos and its mobile radar system, which can track multiple objects using a network of low-cost sensors as opposed to a large, singular radar.
The goal is to create training scenarios that realistically mimic modern technology being deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere.
“We believe this development will provide a significant validation of our technology,” co-founders and co-chief executives John Tenet and Bo Marr said in a joint statement.
Critical time
Chaos Industries also received a $1.9 million award from the Air Force’s Tactical Funding Increase program, which will take place at the Eglin Air Force Base.
“With global conflicts at their highest point since World War II, providing our military personnel with cutting-edge training capabilities to effectively counter sophisticated threats is more critical than ever,” Tenet and Marr said.
The U.S. Department of War, the original moniker for what was most recently called the Department of Defense that President Donald Trump reinstated earlier in September, is the top funder of military-related companies in Southern California, and for good reason. These startups are becoming an increasingly crucial part of the U.S. war strategy as they develop cheaper, more nimble weapons technology at scale. This allows them to compete with the consumer-grade drones being deployed on the battlefield.
“(Chaos’) architecture unlocks new capabilities in distributed sensing, network coherence, and system survivability,” Scott Sandell, executive chairman and chief investment officer at New Enterprise Associates, said in a statement. “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.”
Southern California military-focused startups have raised around $5.3 billion in venture funding, breaking a 10-year record for the region’s sector, according to PitchBook. Chaos contributed to that with the $275 million Series C it raised back in May, valuing the company at $2 billion. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Accel, with additional partners.
