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Shield AI, a San Diego, CA-based defense technology company building AI pilots for aircraft, raised $165M in Series E funding increasing the valuation to $2.3 billion.
This includes $90 million in equity, and $75 million in debt as part of a Series E fundraising round. The round was led by Snowpoint Ventures’ Doug Philippone, with participation from Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Homebrew, Point72, Andreesen Horowitz, Breyer Capital, and SVB Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and its business reach.
Led by CEO Ryan Tseng, Shield AI a defense technology company building AI pilots for aircraft. Its Hivemind software is an AI pilot for military and commercial aircraft that enables intelligent teams of aircraft to perform missions ranging from room clearance, to penetrating air defense systems, and dogfighting F-16s. Hivemind employs state-of-the-art algorithms for planning, mapping, and state-estimation to enable aircraft to execute dynamic flight maneuvers and uses reinforcement learning for discovery, learning, and execution of winning tactics and strategies. On aircraft, Hivemind enables full autonomy and is designed to run fully on the edge, disconnected from the cloud, in high threat, GPS and communication-degraded environments.
Shield AI’s hardware products are its small-unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) Nova, and its medium-size vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAS, V-BAT. Hivemind is integrated onboard Nova and has been deployed in combat since 2018; it will soon be integrated onboard the V-BAT to further enhance its class-leading capabilities.
The products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and allies.
The company has offices in San Diego, Washington D.C., Dallas, and Abu Dhabi.