If anyone thought the collective spending spree on defense tech was coming to an end any time soon, think again.
Yesterday, Texas-based VC Overmatch Ventures announced that it’s raised a cool $250M second fund, less than 2 years after raising a debut $70M fund in 2024.
Jordan Blashek—GP at Overmatch—told Tectonic that this new pile o’ cash will enable the fund to write bigger checks and double down on the deep tech and defense companies the company has focused on from the start.
“The thesis for Fund Two is we want to back founders who are building what we’re calling the sovereign stack,” Blashek said. “These are the foundational technologies that superpowers are fighting over. Things like AI, energy, space, robotics, defense—the core technologies that, at the end of the day, make the difference between a free and prosperous America and one where we’re subject to coercion by adversarial powers like China.”
The team’s already written two pre-seed checks into “exciting” stealth startups, Blashek said, and will get rolling with the rest of the money ASAP.
Best to move quickly when you’re investing to deter the CCP.
Big bets: If you haven’t heard of Overmatch quite yet, you’ve definitely heard of their portfolio companies. The fund—run by Evan Loomis, Blashek, and new hire Morgan Hitzig (formerly of Venrock)—made about 25 early-stage investments out of its debut fund, including in:
- CHAOS Industries
- Saronic
- Nominal
- Armada AI
Worth noting that three out of four of those companies are now $1B+ unicorns, and all four have raised $100M+ in the past year. Nice bets, team.
Nuts and bolts: With this new fund, Blashek said that they’re looking at the top end of the supply chain—the components and manufacturing that enable all of the fun, shiny, autonomous go boom and zoom stuff we know and love.
“We’re very excited about the critical supply chains and inputs into things like defense capability. Our view is that, at the end of the day, defense is really downstream of technological innovation,” Blashek said.
While they bet on autonomy, drones, and the like early on, now they’re doubling down on the stuff (and systems) that can make sure this new tech is buildable and deployable at scale.
“Where we’re really putting our gaze is in things like the broad industrial manufacturing base, things like energetics, robotic and autonomous manufacturing systems, and rare earth and critical mineral and material supply chains,” Blashek added. “Those broadly plug into these core capabilities we need as a nation.”
It’s the war, stupid: A lot of the reason behind raising this new fund so quickly—they closed the $250M in about three months, from November to January—comes down to, well, the state of the world, Blashek said.
“What we’re seeing in Ukraine is [that] our military capabilities are so qualitatively better on the battlefield, and yet our production capability is lagging, and we’re quickly running out of stockpiles of interceptors, and all of that has to get rebuilt,” he said. “We need to rebuild it, not for the current war, but for the next one.”
And as for the tech Overmatch thinks will power that next war? “It will be much more autonomous, much more swarm-driven,” Blashek said. “It’ll integrate a lot of exquisite capabilities with these new, advanced, attritable systems. There’s a huge effort that needs to be made to rebuild the industrial base for that and to upgrade all the capabilities for the next conflict.”
Cash that check: Blashek says that the team plans to keep things to the earlier stages in this fund, too: They plan to invest in (and potentially lead) pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds, all with slightly larger check sizes.
- Pre-seed will be $1-2M
- Seed will be $3-7M
- Series A will be $7-15M
In an interview with Bloomberg, Hitzig explained why they’ve stayed early-stage: “Because we’re in that really early stage from a capability standpoint, I think there’s just so much room to run for this domain.”