Look out, world. The space guys are coming for your defense contracts.
This morning, Antaris—which, to date, has done simulation and modeling primarily for space-based assets—announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it’s launching a dedicated defense-focused mission virtualization company called Aeonyx.
The company will help “defense organizations evaluate architectures, validate operational concepts, improve operational performance and flexibility, and understand mission outcomes before real-world deployment.” In other words, it will allow defense companies (including Lockheed Martin—an existing customer) to play around with all of their fun, expensive assets in a virtual environment before wasting, like, billions of dollars deploying them incorrectly.
“Aeonyx’s mission is to virtualize everything,” Aeonyx CEO (and former Antaris CGO) John Trionfo told Tectonic. “When I say everything, I mean seafloor to cis-lunar and everything in between…We’re not there yet, but that’s the path that we’re on.”
All aboard the defense tech train!
Outta this world: Now, if you read Payload, you’ll know Antaris, but it might not be a household name for some of our harder-core defense heads out there.
- The company was founded back in 2021 in California by Tom Barton (CEO) and Karthik Govindhasamy, who both previously held leadership roles at Planet Labs.
- The idea was to take AI and modeling and all the fun, new computer-y stuff and apply it to assets in space. Kind of like what Applied Intuition has done for vehicles, they built a way for customers to play around with digital copies of real-world (very expensive) assets before deploying them in space.
- Its software lets customers virtually test an entire satellite mission before committing to hardware, which helps reduce cost, speed up development, and lessen integration nightmares. “You get the integration done much earlier, and you understand those breakage points long before you’re billions of dollars in, and realizing, ‘Oh, we need another billion to wrap some duct tape around something to make it work,’” Trionfo explained.
- The company has also added AI on top of its stack in recent years to help with things like mission planning and autonomous on-orbit operations.
- And they’ve raised a pretty penny to do all this—the company has raked in about $38M from backers including WestWave Capital, HCVC, LMV, New Vista Capital, and Planet Ventures.
Dual-use: If you’re sitting there thinking, “Wait, that sounds like it could be really useful for way more than just space-based assets,” you’re not the only one.
- The idea behind Aeonyx is to take all that simulation and modeling expertise—plus a customer base that includes the Missile Defense Agency, the Space Force, Lockheed Martin, and “three of the primes,” per Trionfo—and apply it to straight defense.
- Customers will be able to add assets—which will eventually include everything from ground vehicles to satellites to maritime vessels—to their digital “armory.” Then, they can carry out integration and mission simulation on the virtual “range” to make sure things are working as they should.
- Per Trionfo, the “objective is to provide a great, standard, COTS software platform that people can use to solve whatever mission need they have, whether it be existing missions and operations or to build and integrate new things like Golden Dome.”
Checkmate: Speaking of the Golden Dome, it sounds like the mega-missile-defense project—and the many, many layered assets it will require—is a big part of the thinking behind expanding further into the defense category for Aeonyx.
“If you look at the Golden Dome chessboard, there are a lot of players, there are a whole lot of different parts, and that’s great,” Trionfo said. “But it all has to come together. You’ve got SBI on one side and on-ground interceptors on the other. That all has to exist in a software-driven world sooner rather than later.”
Fast friends: Plus, it helps that Aeonyx will kick things off with a pretty hefty portfolio of customers—it’s taking over most of the defense and government work from Antaris.
- Customers, including MDA, SDA, the Space Force, and Lockheed Martin, will get passed over to the new company.
- Worth noting that Lockheed Martin Ventures was an early backer of the company and participated in their $28M Series A earlier this year. They were also one of their earliest customers, per Trionfo.
“[Lockheed] does things measured in one to two years on the software side. We do them in one to two weeks, and that’s the gap we help them fill,” he said. “They want to be faster and more dynamic—every single prime has that same challenge. They’re working to unlock all of the knowledge and capabilities that they’ve built over 50 years, but do it in a faster, more dynamic way than they’ve ever done before.”