Reading the Room: The Founder's Invisible Advantage
14 May 2025 - A Weekly Publication by New North Ventures
NatSecEDGE Conference: Securing America’s Technological Advantage
At New North Ventures, we recognize that America's technological advantage requires deliberate cultivation through strategic partnerships and principled investment. The NatSecEDGE Conference represents a crucial convergence point where visionary leaders across the defense innovation ecosystem align their efforts to address emerging threats and seize technological opportunities.
Hosted by The Cipher Brief in Austin, Texas on June 5-6, this gathering focuses on frontier domains including AI, Space, Quantum, and critical infrastructure protection. These fields represent both our nation's greatest vulnerabilities and its most promising avenues for maintaining strategic superiority.
New North Ventures' support and participation underscore our commitment to fostering public-private collaboration that accelerates dual-use innovations. Our team looks forward to engaging with decision-makers who share our mission of strengthening national security while creating commercial value through transformative technologies.
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Join us at NatSecEDGE as we advance the critical mission of protecting democracy through principled innovation and investment. Together, we will shape the technological frontier that safeguards our nation's future.
The engineers have their moment, and it's glorious. They build things that shouldn't exist, things that make physicists blink twice. Everyone applauds. But then comes the meeting with the four-star general with combat ribbons stacked like poker chips, and suddenly the algorithms aren't enough.
What happens next separates the unicorns from the also-rans.
The defense tech world is filled with brilliant minds who can explain quantum computing but can't read a room. They miss the signals hiding in plain sight: the way the Air Force colonel crosses his arms when you mention autonomous systems, or how the procurement officer perks up at "battle-tested" but retreats at "bleeding-edge."
The founders who win don't just have better technology—they have psychological peripheral vision. They've learned to spot the institutional memory that no spec sheet acknowledges. They detect the invisible fault lines between service branches that have been there since Korea.
The most fascinating pattern? The standout founders navigate two worlds effortlessly. They speak DARPA in the morning and Silicon Valley after lunch. They know when the pitch needs more bits and bytes and when it needs stories about what happens when systems fail in sandstorms.
When these founders walk into the Pentagon, they don't just bring schematics—they bring situational awareness. They recognize that behind every technical requirement is a human being who once watched a promising technology fail at the worst possible moment.
The venture firms placing the smartest bets aren't just evaluating technology—they're spotting the rare founders who can read the undercurrents of human dynamics that ultimately determine which innovations deploy and which die in committee.
The technology opens the door. The human insight walks through it, smiling.
More links to explore:
Founded: 2016
Key People: CEO Jason Hundley
Elevator Pitch: Manufacturer of rocket propellant intended to offer affordable access to orbit for commercial and government payloads. The company's propellant reduces the lifecycle cost and improves the overall responsiveness and rocket motor manufacturing technology, combined with space launch and modular boost platforms, makes a disruptive emerging supplier to the defense and national security industries, enabling clients with high-speed electro-spin optimized for the constituent, fuel, binders and oxidizers required for solid propellant.
Funding: The company raised $35 million of Series B venture funding in a deal led by Lockheed Martin Ventures on May 12, 2025, putting the company's pre-money valuation at $565 million.
In our most recent episode of the Securing Our Future Podcast, general partner Jeremy Hitchcock sits down with Paul Thompson, a 20-year Army Special Forces veteran now helping bridge critical technology gaps at Morgan 6 LLC. Together, they dive into how commercial and national security sectors collaborate to drive innovation.
