TECH SILICON VALLEY STARTUPS ARE INVADING THE MILITARY MARKET

AT THE END of February 2022-a few days after cofounders Luke Allen and Steven Simoni sold their 90-person restaurant-tech startup to DoorDashRussia invaded Ukraine.

- JESSICA MATHEWS

Allen, who, like Simoni, had served in the Navy, immediately pivoted and started designing virtualreality headset software that would help train Ukrainian soldiers in the use of Javelin anti-tank weapons provided by the U.S. military. Soon his focus turned to the drones deployed in the conflict.

Allen persuaded Simoni to leave DoorDash earlier this year and work with him at his new company, Allen Control Systems, to build a gun turret that uses computer vision to blast drones out of the sky. The goal was to create something affordable that could stop the HESA Shahed-136 drones Russia was sending to attack Ukraine's infrastructure. "Right now, cheap drones like that are a weapon without a countermeasure," Allen says.

The former restaurant tech entrepreneurs are among a new breed of founders bringing the startup playbook to the staid defense industry.

With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, the need-and opportunity for innovation are on display every day as drones, AI, and other commercially available technologies reshape reality on the battlefield.

HOSTILE TERRITORY

Silicon Valley and the military have a complicated history. While Cold War military contracts helped create the U.S. tech industry, many of today's techies consider the defense sector anathema-workers at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have staged multiple protests in recent years to oppose their employers' business ties with the Pentagon and the Israeli military.