Like kids on Christmas morning, the defense tech world waits up each year for Silicon Valley Defense Group’s NatSec100 report—the nonprofit’s annual ranking and analysis of the top 100 venture-backed, dual-use and defense tech companies shaping US national security innovation. This week, the report finally dropped.
Seeing green: The long and short of it is that, basically, the Brinks trucks were brought out this year. The 100 companies on SVDG’s list won a total of $26.8B in federal awards ($25.8B in prime contracts) and raised $70.1B in private capital, up 18% and 32% from last year, respectively. Of the companies on the list, 34 were new inclusions and 42 were “three-peats.”
That’s a lot of champagne corks popped in the defense tech world.
Calling the shots: Not just anyone is invited to the NatSec100 party. Here are some of SVDG’s baseline requirements to keep things fair and focused:
- They do a momentum-centric ranking based on recent and total capital raised, headcount growth, and publicly available data—not valuations or classified work.
- Companies must be venture- or PE-backed, privately held, and not acquired by a public firm.
- These must have clear dual-use or defense relevance and pass foreign ownership vetting.
- SVDG uses consistent methodology to maintain year-over-year repeatability and reliability.
So, who had the momentum?
Well, who else but Anduril, which took the top spot for the third year running (the dataset isolates SpaceX, which SVDG said “operates at a scale beyond other companies in the NatSec100”). The rest of the NatSec100 list, as SVDG put it, “continues to be dominated by companies in AI, software, cyber, and space.”
California Dreamin’: That digital dominance meant that the Golden State had a golden year. Out of the 100 companies on SVDG’s list, 59 are headquartered in California, including 17 in the top 25.
“Silicon Valley is where engineering talent, venture capital, and a risk-taking culture collides,” Jason Brown, GM for Defense at Mountain View-based Applied Intuition, told Tectonic via email. “The cutting-edge software, AI, and autonomy coming out of the Valley have become core areas of national security.”
Droning on: However, Silicon Valley software isn’t the only thing getting attention. The US, SVDG argues, is also facing a drone-driven and “defining inflection point.” In Ukraine, “We are witnessing a revolution in military affairs—defined by low-cost, attritable, beyond visual-line-of-sight drones,” they write.
cUAS-maker Epirus, which jumped from 90th last year to 10th, told Tectonic in a statement that “Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web and Israel’s Operation Rising Lion are clear signals of the lasting impact drones are having on modern battlefields.” Epirus’ rise up the list shows how seriously US investors and the Pentagon are now taking counter-drone threats—before we’re on the receiving end of an equally fearsomely-named operation.
Software, hard truths: While AI and autonomy companies are, indeed, popping bottles, SVDG cautioned that other priority tech areas—microelectronics, directed energy, quantum, and hypersonics—remain critically underrepresented in the report. “This lack of balance has consequences,” SVDG warned. “We can’t build a resilient defense innovation base on software alone—even if it remains central to modernization efforts.”