Silicon Valley Defense Group’s NATSEC100, sponsored by JPMorganChase, is our annual ranked list of leading venture-funded, national security-focused and dual-use startups. SVDG undertook the initiative and published our inaugural report last year to offer a data-driven snapshot in time of our emergent techno-security ecosystem–-one which we believed and hoped would drive meaningful, if pointed, discourse about the state of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and broader National Security Innovation Base (NSIB).

Last year’s list achieved exactly what we hoped it would, sparking widespread discussion, impassioned disagreement, and informed debate on the Hill, in the press, among venture capitalists (VC) and in closed policymaker conversations in which we had the privilege of participating. These conversations focused not just on the list itself but, much more importantly, on the state of what SVDG terms the Emerging Tech Readiness Ecosystem (“the Ecosystem”). The discussions generated policy positions and mid-term objectives for SVDG as well as some key learnings that we analyzed deeply and incorporated into this year’s approach. 

The 2024 NATSEC100 list features 44 new companies—a nearly 50% turnover from our inaugural 2023 list. The high turnover rate is almost certainly a product of two factors. First, this year we widened the aperture through which we assessed the universe of eligible NATSEC100 companies to include all venture-backed startups and non-traditionals that have publicly available evidence of their technology’s use in a national security context. Accordingly, we included companies working in spaces not traditionally defined as “defense” (e.g., homeland security, intelligence, financial crimes, etc.). This very deliberate decision on our part was a nod to the absolutely myopic way in which our national defense has traditionally been defined, approached, and funded. We hope that our expanded aperture drives additional conversation about and investment in the critical technologies and sectors over which and with which we could absolutely go to war, to include next-gen compute, EUV lithography, AI-enabled synthetic biology, renewable energy, and the like. Secondly, it is unsurprising that our 2024 list features substantial company turnover, given the unprecedented emergence of new venture-backed startups and the fact that private capital markets tend to quickly reward successful companies over less successful or slower-to-revenue competitors. 

As of June 2024, this year’s NATSEC100 companies have collectively attracted over $52 billion in private funding, an aggregate increase of almost 20% over the $42 billion raised by last year’s cohort. Like last year, each company on the list is developing technology that is essential to the continued security of democracies around the globe, with each also backed by a sampling of the world’s foremost venture capital firms. This year, we also felt it was important to strive to provide deeper insights into federal funding awarded to our NATSEC100 companies. The topline for the publicly available contracting data presents a troubling picture: despite raising over $52 billion dollars in private funding, the 2024 NATSEC100 companies have only been awarded $22 billion in federal funding, and only $6 billion of that from the Department of Defense (DoD), where the roots of this project and of our organization began. Perhaps even more strikingly, 81% of the total amount awarded by the United States Government, and 65% of the DoD-awarded funding, went to a single company, SpaceX, which earned our #1 spot for the second consecutive year.