And now for the big reveal: On Tuesday, defense mapping startup Reveal Technology announced a $30M Series B led by Ballistic Ventures with participation from Booz Allen Ventures, Shield Capital, and others. That’s a big—and speedy-quick—jump from its $11.2M Series A last December.
Founded in 2018, Reveal grew out of its co-founders’ firsthand combat experience with pen-and-paper maps in a digital warzone. “We’d have to go around a corner or over a hill, and the terrain on the other side was in no way represented on that map,” CEO Garrett Smith told Tectonic in an interview. “You’re making all these crazy, impactful decisions on the fly with almost no situational awareness.”
The tech: After Smith got out of active service in the Marines (he’s still in the reserves) and had his “Silicon Valley awakening,” he developed Reveal’s Farsight software because of these “holy shit” moments.
Here’s what it does:
- Developed with USSOCOM, the flagship software turns drone video into high-resolution 3D maps on mobile devices within minutes (and offline).
- It can import and export maps and data to platforms like the Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK).
- It’s been deployed with USSOCOM since 2021 and is in operational use with the Army, Marines, and international partners, including Ukraine and the UK.
Last year, Reveal added a second product after acquiring DFL Technologies: a mobile, offline biometric identity verification platform called Identifi. If Farsight provides mobile intelligence for the land, Identifi delivers it for the human terrain.
Reveal has been on a tear. It won a $33.6M STRATFI contract to scale Farsight, a $3.2M award from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, and recently partnered with Maxar to enhance its mapping with satellite imagery. Smith says revenue has tripled year-on-year since 2022, and that their traction with the military made the Series B a no-brainer.
“In the defense ecosystem, the moment when you really want to dump gasoline on the fire is when you’ve got product market fit and contracts that allow customers to execute purchase orders with you very quickly,” Smith said. “That’s what the Series B was all about.”
Ramping up: Post-raise, Reveal is focused on three priorities:
- Building out the team, including hiring leaders “that are specialists in ways that the founders aren’t,” namely in cybersecurity.
- Developing in-house “organic, edge- and mobile-based cyber and electronic warfare tools” for Farsight and Identifi.
- Buying up companies that can enhance Reveal’s products.
Path to prime: “All the big players are platforms. They have multiple products and they acquire others, so a significant chunk of the Series B will be aimed at inorganic growth. We intend to acquire companies,” Smith told Tectonic. “We had an amazing experience hardening [DFL Technologies’] product and we want to keep doing that with other tools oriented at the end-user at the edge.”
The company is ultimately aiming for what Smith calls “fused intelligence,” combining Reveal’s human terrain insights and geospatial mapping tools with robotic platforms. “Investing in fusing these different situational awareness tools could link the downstream intelligence we’re generating to upstream robotic autonomy.”
Smith has set his bar high. “In the next couple of years, we’re going to be in that same category as the Andurils of the world,” he said, hinting that the company has some “major purchase orders” from USSOCOM and the Army in the works. Strong words—we’ll see what they reveal.