At Snowpoint, we back dual-tech companies looking to navigate the complexities of government and commercial use. We lean on our deep industry knowledge and operational experience to help these businesses overcome the nuanced challenges and risks associated with creating innovations and cutting-edge technology that will protect our national security and deliver value to societies at large.
We see a major technological shift on the global stage that is transforming all aspects of modern life and aim to be at the forefront of driving this necessary transformation across both defense and commercial markets all from the lens of rediscovering the roots of U.S. venture capital.
With new technologies coming online faster than ever before and governments greatly increasing R&D spend globally we find ourselves at a precipice not seen before. In addition to continued consolidation in the defense industrial base a misalignment on incentives between the government and the commercial sector has been allowed to continue which has resulted in an inefficient process to rapidly develop and deploy innovative technologies leaving us exposed.
An Innovation Mindset
Cell phone, radar, GPS, the internet, and many other everyday use items owe their existence to research by governments pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
The internet’s origins date back to the late 1960s, when a DARPA-fueled research project created what was then called “Arpanet”. In the decades that followed, the world wide web emerged from Arpanet, satellites proliferated in support of global positioning systems, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags were invented and placed on items for inventory tracking. Taken together, this set the foundation for what we now call the “internet of things” (IoT).
As the IoT, the remote work movement, and geostationary orbit satellites deepen their footholds within the commercial sector, and as the battlefield grows increasingly distributed with each successive global conflict, edge communications are approaching another breakthrough age.
In tandem, speed and distance with which business and militaries operate is continuously increasing, and their communications capabilities must keep pace. The world’s new level of interconnectedness has pushed many to value privacy over convenience — something that the defense sector has been doing for years.
Thanks to the precipitous rise and continued exponential increase and adaptation in these technologically infused spaces, the potential on both sides of the dual-tech coin is far from being realized. We believe by backing this decade’s visionary entrepreneurs — those who create products or services which completely transform their customers’ businesses or livelihoods — will leave a tremendous impact on both the commercial and defense sectors.
Inflection Point
Commercial and government demand over the next decade will be vastly different than the past decades, and valuable developmental lessons learned in the late 2010s will illuminate the path forward for the next decade. Today’s robots appear to be reaching an inflection point — exponential growth in intelligence, computational power, and capabilities are accelerating.
The rise in big data is creating a demand for a more efficient means of organization and analysis, setting the table for AI in dozens of verticals including healthcare, military, and industrials.
The ever-tenuous geopolitical landscape is pushing billions of government dollars into developing new advances in technologies which have endless use-cases across all sectors. Against this backdrop, the major defense industrial complex in its current form lacks the processes and structure to blaze this new trail for the next generation of companies and technologies.
Within this startup ecosystem, we see many compelling opportunities in the future — soon, technology will no longer limit this field’s ability to change the world. Instead, market conditions will be the greatest indicator for transformative potential, and we believe dual-tech business models will be among the most successful of all robotics, artificial intelligence, and data companies.
New Frontiers
As the world continues to watch tensions percolate and conflicts arise, we at Snowpoint believe that the startup ecosystem will be the answer to mitigating, protecting, and deterring.
We are focused on backing and helping build exceptional companies that are intersection of both commercial and defense to further national security and societal resilience.
Since 2021, there has been almost $100B invested into the Defense Tech space, which is nearly 40% higher than the prior 7 years combined. History has proven that entrepreneurs can succeed in breaking into the dual-tech space, they just need the capital to do so. The dual-tech overlap is larger than most investors realize and the ones that stand ready to back companies at the center of it will be heavily rewarded.