One Mission builds low-cost hardware modules that secure data and artificial intelligence on small drones and autonomous systems. This technology prevents adversaries from extracting sensitive intelligence or reverse-engineering equipment when drones are captured on the battlefield.

• Small drones are increasingly common in modern warfare but currently lack approved security measures to protect the data they carry.
• The company offers a physical security module that easily fits into disposable drones to ensure captured equipment does not leak mission details.
• Revenue is based on a per-drone security license, allowing the company to grow directly alongside the massive increase in drone production.
• There is currently no strong competition in this new market, as other options are incomplete or require constant government waivers.
• The team includes experienced veterans from major defense contractors and has already initiated a research agreement with the Army while preparing a fall prototype.

Qunett builds quantum repeaters and routers that send quantum information across fiber and satellite links to create a secure, distributed quantum internet. This hardware protects critical data with unbreakable encryption and connects isolated quantum computers across global distances.

• The company has secured $6 million in federal research funding and has seven active programs to get their hardware ready for satellite deployment.
• Their quantum memory chip can hold over one million qubits in a single module, while competing technologies can only hold a few.
• They are the only company building networks that actively fix errors at every stop, which is necessary to keep quantum information safe over long distances.
• The founding team and advisors include top quantum networking professors from MIT and UMD who have published over 150 peer-reviewed papers.
• They have already shown that people want their products by selling early versions of their memory chips and scanners to quantum networking teams in 2025.

Bosonic builds distributed quantum computers by connecting simple, highly stable ion trap processors over standard telecom networks. This approach makes quantum computing affordable and scalable, opening up access to a technology that is currently restricted by extreme costs and limited availability.

• Instead of charging massive subscription fees or forcing users to wait in long queues, the company plans to offer cloud access for just $10 per qubit-hour.
• The hardware relies on a modular design that links stable ion qubits with photons, meaning the system can easily grow by adding more modules rather than building entirely new machines.
• Their trap design removes common maintenance issues that typically waste 80 percent of a quantum computer's runtime, resulting in a system that can run continuously for weeks.
• The startup has already secured 15 letters of intent from various industries, including biotech, academia, and a multibillion-dollar financial services firm, and recently submitted a DARPA application with the Stanford Research Institute.
• The founding team includes quantum physics and economics PhDs, as well as engineers who have already published the foundational research needed to build these specific network links.

Verustruct builds compact robots and software that automate the construction of load-bearing concrete walls directly on building sites. This approach lowers the cost and time needed to build homes, helping to solve the housing shortage caused by slow and labor-intensive traditional construction.

• The company uses small robots that climb the walls as they build them, which removes the need for large, expensive support frames.
• Instead of inventing new materials, the robots work with standard concrete and existing supply chains, making it much easier to get building code approvals.
• The technology can finish structural walls in days instead of months, cutting construction costs down to $100 per square foot compared to the traditional $162 average.
• Customers design their buildings in a software platform that automatically checks for structural safety and turns the plans directly into robot instructions.
• The team is led by a former SpaceX engineer and is setting up initial pilot projects in Southern California with about $10 million in soft commitments toward their seed funding.

KeeperSpace builds automated traffic control and collision avoidance systems for satellites in orbit. This infrastructure prevents catastrophic crashes that could destroy critical space assets and render entire orbits unusable for decades.

• The number of satellites in space is skyrocketing, but operators still coordinate traffic manually using emails and outdated data formats from the Apollo era.
• The company is creating an automated traffic control network for space, bringing the same safety standards to orbit that airplanes use to avoid mid-air collisions.
• Their system combines space-based sensors with onboard software to give satellites the ability to automatically detect and dodge hazards.
• This technology can spot tiny pieces of debris down to one centimeter and reduces the chance of a major space collision by up to 97 percent.
• They already have two signed agreements worth over $8 million, plus active negotiations with major satellite operators and data providers.

Astral Space provides in-orbit refueling services and builds in-space fuel depots to extend the lifespan of satellites and spacecraft. This prevents expensive space assets from becoming useless when their initial fuel runs out, allowing operators to keep generating revenue.

• The company is building dedicated refueling spacecraft to service the more than 16,000 satellites currently in orbit.
• Adding just one kilogram of extra fuel can create over $1 million in additional revenue for a single satellite.
• Their long-term plan is to mine resources on the Moon to make fuel, which takes ten times less energy to deliver to Earth's orbit than launching it from the ground.
• The startup already has strong early traction, including letters of intent from customers, an investor term sheet, and a demonstration mission planned for 2027.
• The founder brings direct industry experience from Firefly Aerospace and Blue Origin, where they built critical rocket and cryogenic components.

Nilufer engineers host animals to carry human pregnancies, providing a legal and scalable alternative to traditional human surrogacy. This approach allows people with viable frozen embryos to have genetic children without the massive costs and ethical hurdles of using a human surrogate.

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• Tens of thousands of viable human embryos are currently frozen because the parents lack a healthy womb to carry them, showing a clear demand for this service.
• The company edits the genes of host animals, such as capybaras, so their immune systems accept a human embryo without ever altering the human DNA itself.
• By relying on animal husbandry instead of human carriers, the cost of a surrogacy journey drops from over $150,000 to a much lower, predictable price.
• Using animal hosts avoids the strict legal bans and complex ethical concerns that restrict commercial human surrogacy in many countries.
• The team has already proven the concept by having a rat successfully give birth to a mouse, and they plan to generate early revenue by breeding engineered primates for pharmaceutical research.

Chimera Bioscience uses precision fermentation and a proprietary microbe to produce high-quality, natural pigments from cheap feedstocks. This sustainable approach replaces highly polluting manufacturing methods to create valuable dyes faster and cheaper than synthetic alternatives.

• The company has already made $155,000 in revenue in under six months and has a $1.5 million pipeline of projects waiting for approval.
• Their first target is the denim industry, and they are currently preparing for blue jean trials with three different manufacturers.
• They own the rights to a unique microbe that makes natural pigments faster and cheaper than synthetic options.
• The technology uses artificial intelligence to speed up development and needs five times less upfront money than current industry standards.
• The founding team has over 15 years of experience in biotech and fermentation research, with a history of managing large budgets and hundreds of employees.

AiravataBio builds portable, waterless sterilization devices that use UV-C light to clean surgical instruments in places without traditional infrastructure. This technology prevents deadly infections in field medicine, rural clinics, and military zones by providing hospital-grade sterility anywhere.

• The main device replaces massive, water-heavy sterilizers with a lightweight machine that cleans surgical tools in just 90 seconds using only a standard power source.
• It uses a specially shaped reflective chamber to bounce UV-C light onto every single surface of an instrument, solving the shadowing problem that causes other portable cleaners to fail.
• The company is selling to the military first because the Department of Defense does not require FDA clearance, allowing them to make money years faster than a typical medical hardware startup.
• They are funding their early work through government grants to keep ownership of the company, and the U.S. Air Force is already testing their prototype.
• Beyond cleaning tools, they are building automated sensors that constantly check the air for biological threats to catch and stop outbreaks before they spread.

Dualys Bio engineers programmable bacterial enzymes that act like CRISPR for proteins, cutting and destroying disease-driving proteins inside cells. This approach eliminates cancer targets that lack binding pockets and are completely unreachable by traditional pills or antibodies.

• Instead of trying to bind to a specific pocket on a protein like traditional drugs do, this technology uses an enzyme to simply cut the target protein into pieces so the cell can clear it away.
• Because the enzyme destroys its target and moves on to the next one, a single enzyme can eliminate many disease-causing molecules.
• The company built a computational engine that filtered over 120,000 potential cutting sites down to 52 highly specific targets, ensuring the cuts actually disable the disease.
• Their first major project focuses on prostate cancer by targeting the androgen receptor, providing a clear and testable path to prove the technology works.
• While still in the early stages of lab testing, the company has already earned strong outside validation, including an invitation for an NSF grant, a DARPA presentation, and active interest from multiple venture capital firms.

TargetOS is a causal AI platform that maps gene networks using real patient data to discover and validate new drug targets. This approach predicts exactly how human cells will respond to a drug before clinical trials begin, preventing pharmaceutical companies from wasting billions of dollars on ineffective treatments.

• Most drugs fail in clinical trials because they focus on the wrong biological targets, which wastes years of research and billions of dollars.
• Standard AI models often fail because they only look for patterns, whereas this system uses cause-and-effect logic to see what actually happens when a specific gene is turned off.
• The software is already proven to be 134% more accurate than leading AI models at predicting how genes will react to being silenced.
• Instead of relying on public information, the company runs its own lab experiments on patient cells to build a private dataset that competitors cannot easily copy.
• The founding team brings decades of experience from top biotech and AI companies, and they are initially focusing on psoriatic arthritis to fill a massive upcoming gap in the pharmaceutical market.

Myriad Labs creates biologically realistic microplastic reference materials to help scientists study how non-biological particles behave inside the human body. By providing standardized fragments made from real plastic, the company enables accurate research into the health impacts of plastic exposure and its link to chronic diseases.

• The company already has paying customers, with over 15 research labs actively using their product and early commercial sales closed before raising funding.
• Instead of making artificial plastic spheres, they grind up real plastic to create realistic test materials that scientists can easily track using fluorescence.
• They secured a major partnership with Fisher Scientific, giving them access to over 1,200 sales reps to distribute their product to thousands of labs without hiring their own sales team.
• When researchers use these standard materials in their experiments, they have to keep reordering them for future studies, creating a reliable stream of repeat customers.
• While they are starting with microplastics, the underlying technology can eventually be applied to study other environmental hazards like wildfire smoke or even help design new nanoparticle medicines.

Lab 91 is a fabless semiconductor company that creates ultra-thin, atomic-scale chips using 2D materials to replace traditional silicon. This technology breaks through current physical limits to power the next generation of high-speed AI data centers, 6G networks, and satellite communications.

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• Traditional silicon chips are hitting a physical wall because they cannot shrink much further, making new atomic-scale materials necessary for future progress.
• While other companies are stuck in research labs using high-temperature methods, Lab 91 uses a low-temperature process that easily fits into existing chip factories.
• Their first product is a wireless switch that is ten times better than current options and natively supports the high frequencies needed for future 6G and space communications.
• The company is working directly with major semiconductor design teams and data centers to solve urgent power and speed limits in next-generation optical connections.
• The leadership team combines top university scientists with experienced industry executives who have a proven history of running major chip manufacturing plants and leading government research programs.

MoltenDynamics builds advanced cooling systems that use liquid metal and electromagnetic pumps to pull heat away from high-power AI chips. This technology removes heat much better than traditional water systems, allowing data centers to run denser, higher-performing servers without switching to complex cooling setups.

• The system uses liquid metal that is 100 times more thermally conductive than standard coolants, removing heat 4.5 times better than current water-based systems.
• It moves the liquid metal using electromagnetic pumps that have no moving parts, which increases reliability and reduces maintenance.
• By offering high cooling capacity in a standard cold plate design, it allows companies to avoid the expensive transition to complex immersion or two-phase cooling infrastructure.
• The company is already in technical due diligence with four massive tech companies and has joint development agreements with three global leaders in hyperscale systems and autonomous mobility.
• The leadership team has deep experience in thermal hardware, having previously built, scaled, and successfully sold multiple technology startups.

TrelliSense builds affordable, highly precise laser sensors that continuously monitor industrial sites for methane leaks. This technology helps companies quickly find and fix leaks, which saves them money by capturing lost gas while significantly reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

• The company has grown four times over the past two years and has successfully converted all of its early pilot customers into larger contracts across multiple sites.
• Instead of relying on satellites that miss small leaks or expensive manual camera inspections, these solar-powered lasers run continuously to detect tiny amounts of methane from hundreds of meters away.
• The service pays for itself quickly, as finding just one major gas leak can cover the cost of an entire year of monitoring.
• The platform is sold based on its direct financial benefits rather than just meeting regulations, because capturing lost gas directly increases revenue for operators in waste, agriculture, and energy.
• The founding team brings decades of experience in physics, chemistry, and hardware engineering from national laboratories and leading energy companies.

Cabomba creates a nanomaterial coating for HVAC filters that captures particles using molecular attraction instead of physical blocking. This allows data centers to maintain high air quality while cutting the energy needed to push air through filters by up to 80 percent.

• The technology achieves 99.9 percent particle capture with about one-sixth the air resistance of standard filters.
• A standard 50-megawatt data center can save over 2.5 million dollars a year on energy, paying back the slightly higher cost of the filters in just two to three months.
• The company already has an issued US patent and has successfully proven the coating works on standard sheet-size filters with a major manufacturer.
• Instead of licensing the technology, they plan to use a supply partnership model where they earn a fee for every unit sold by equipment manufacturers.
• While starting with data center air systems, the core technology can eventually expand into liquid cooling, semiconductor water purification, and industrial wastewater.

Aether builds low-cost, autonomous cruise missiles designed to swarm and destroy enemy air defenses. This approach protects human pilots and provides the military with an affordable, long-range solution to overwhelm expensive radar systems.

• The missiles use a single airframe design with three interchangeable payloads for decoy, electronic warfare, and strike missions, keeping the cost per unit under $250,000.
• The founder has already built a working prototype of the anti-radar seeker for just $1,500, proving the core technology can be made cheaply without relying on expensive off-the-shelf parts.
• The company runs a custom software environment that simulates missile swarms attacking modern air defense batteries to train the machine learning models that will guide the weapons.
• While many defense startups are building cheap drones for standard strike missions, the market for low-cost missiles specifically designed to hunt enemy radar is completely wide open.
• The self-funded founder brings direct experience from the defense industry, having previously built the sensing and perception systems for a military laser designed to shoot down drones.

Kamikaze Motors manufactures soft magnetic composite drone motors entirely free of Chinese components to supply the US military. This provides a domestic source for drone parts ahead of upcoming regulations that ban Chinese motors from the defense supply chain.

• The US Army wants over one million drones, but upcoming regulations will ban Chinese motors by August 2026, creating a large gap in the supply chain.
• Current American-made motors cost over $600 compared to Chinese alternatives that cost under $30, but this new manufacturing approach targets a cost of $300 per motor.
• Instead of the slow, traditional method of stamping and stacking steel sheets, they press powder into a solid motor core in a single step to reduce manufacturing complexity.
• The entire motor is built without any Chinese parts, relying instead on materials like copper, magnets, and bearings sourced from the US, Japan, and Europe.
• The founding team brings hardware and engineering experience from major companies like Tesla, Cisco, and Baxter, and they have already built a working prototype in their garage.

Knossos Grid builds a deployable, decentralized radio frequency mesh network that provides persistent regional monitoring and real-time intelligence. This system gives defense and government operators immediate ground truth to detect and track electronic warfare threats that traditional, fragmented tools often miss.

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• The founding team combines deep technical and regional expertise, led by a CEO who has secured over $140 million in trans-Pacific deals and a Chief Growth Officer with 24 years of special operations communications experience.
• Instead of relying on scarce and expensive platforms, the company uses a distributed network of standardized cells to detect, locate, and identify radio signals across wide areas.
• The technology provides always-on coverage at the edge, overcoming the short flight times of aircraft and the slow update rates of satellites.
• Active discussions are already underway for a paid three-node pilot deployment in the First Island Chain.
• While initially focused on defense and military intelligence, the core technology can easily expand into civilian markets to protect airports, ports, and energy infrastructure from drone threats.

EnderTech builds a real-time simulation platform that combines live sensor data with digital terrain to visualize invisible electromagnetic signals for modern warfare. This allows the military to seamlessly connect training, planning, and live operations in a single environment.

• Current military maps are flat and fail to show invisible signals like radio waves, so this software creates an accurate model of these hidden networks.
• The company has already brought in over $220,000 in revenue and grants, and is on track to close a large prototype deal with the Army later this year.
• The team spent three years building the software alongside the U.S. Army Cyber School and conducted over 300 interviews to ensure it meets the exact needs of soldiers.
• They recently beat major defense contractors in a government simulation contest, proving their technology outperforms the clunky systems currently used by the military.
• The founders are experienced engineers and former military program managers who have worked at top defense companies and government innovation units.

Zero builds an AI smart ring that records both in-person and online conversations to automatically generate notes, summaries, and follow-up tasks. This helps professionals capture important details and remember past interactions without the distraction of manual note-taking.

• The company has strong early demand with over 10,000 people on their waitlist, $40,000 in hardware pre-orders, and strategic talks with major companies for large bulk orders.
• They sell the ring for $99 and pair it with a monthly subscription, creating a strong business model with 85% gross margins.
• The device relies on a custom voice model designed to accurately capture speech in loud, messy real-world environments across more than 99 languages.
• Their main growth strategy focuses on in-person sales at conferences and workshops, which turns attendees into paying users at a very low cost.
• The founding team has a proven track record, having previously built products that reached over 250,000 users and resulted in three successful company exits.

Forg3D builds and operates software-driven digital forges that 3D print large, critical metal parts in days instead of months. This approach replaces slow, traditional foundries with compact manufacturing cells, allowing industries like aerospace and defense to quickly source strong metal components onshore.

• The company already has a working factory in the UK that has completed $500,000 in paid projects for aerospace, defense, and energy clients.
• Instead of waiting over 30 weeks for traditional metal casting, these digital cells print complex metal parts in days while wasting 60 percent less raw material.
• They solved a major problem with 3D printing metal by controlling how the material heats and cools, creating titanium parts that are stronger than industry standards without needing extra processing.
• Rather than selling the printers, they operate the machines themselves and place them directly inside customer factories, which keeps their technology and data secure.
• The founding team includes six experts with deep experience in metal 3D printing and robotics who have successfully built and launched this exact type of technology together before.

PhotonDx builds small, machine learning-powered optical sensors that provide continuous, real-time molecular measurements outside of traditional laboratories. This allows industries like biopharma and healthcare to monitor critical processes instantly instead of waiting for slow and expensive lab results.

• The platform combines advanced optical physics, custom materials, and artificial intelligence to read complex molecular signals within a very small device.
• Instead of sending samples to a lab and waiting for experts to interpret them, these sensors offer instant, non-stop monitoring right where the action happens.
• The company is starting by helping biopharmaceutical companies track their manufacturing processes in real time, with plans to expand into healthcare diagnostics and environmental tracking.
• The business model relies on selling the physical sensor hardware and charging a recurring fee for the software that analyzes the data.
• The founder is an Oxford researcher with ten years of experience in nanophotonics and biosensors, and the company is currently raising $2 million to build its first prototype and test it with customers.

Versa Materials Technology produces cathode active material for lithium-ion batteries using a streamlined spray-pyrolysis process. This approach creates a fully domestic supply chain that breaks the industry's heavy reliance on Chinese imports while significantly lowering production costs.

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• Their unique spray method cuts the manufacturing process from 14 steps down to 6, which drops equipment costs by half and production costs by 40 percent.
• The process creates zero wastewater and completely removes the need to buy precursor materials from China.
• A single factory line can produce several different types of battery chemistries simply by changing the metal mixture they put into the system.
• They already have strong customer interest, including three signed agreements worth about $14 million a year and an active technical project with General Motors.
• The leadership team includes a former Tesla engineer who helped design North America's first commercial cathode plant and a chief scientist with over 25 years of battery research experience.

Obotiq builds autonomous care robots that handle routine, non-clinical tasks in senior living facilities so caregivers can focus on actual patient care. This helps solve severe staffing shortages and reduces caregiver burnout as the aging population rapidly increases.

• The robot, named Gracie, frees up to 45% of a caregiver's workload by answering call lights, delivering items, and doing wellness checks.
• It cuts resident wait times by up to 75%, dropping response times from over 12 minutes to about 3 minutes, while costing significantly less than human staff.
• The team moves incredibly fast, building three working prototypes in 90 days and securing a paid pilot in under six months.
• During live testing in a real facility, the robot achieved nearly 99% task completion and room accuracy with zero safety incidents.
• They offer the robots as a service, with a $4,000 build cost and $1,000 to $3,000 monthly pricing, meaning the hardware pays for itself in about four months.

Sagitta Borealis Systems builds low-cost, 3D-printed electrospray thrusters and custom nanoparticle propellants for small satellites. This technology gives massive satellite networks the reliable, lightweight propulsion they need to stay in orbit and safely de-orbit without taking up too much space or power.

• Instead of taking months and costing thousands of dollars, the company can 3D print and test new thruster designs in just a couple of hours for about two dollars.
• The system runs on a custom-engineered fluid filled with nanoparticles, which replaces the outdated chemical liquids traditionally used in space.
• The startup has already secured letters of intent from the Air Force Research Lab and the Naval Research Lab, proving early demand from major government players.
• They are backed by a $1 million DARPA grant and a $100,000 Activate fellowship, and they hold two provisional patents for their hardware and fuel.
• Before launching into space, they plan to sell a standardized $10,000 test version of their thruster to research labs to bring in early revenue and gather direct feedback.