On oil rigs and in remote mines (not to mention military bases, fire prevention outposts, or even elite surfing competitions) there is a basic challenge that holds back the simple use of exciting new models of synthetic intelligence: data. camera and a drone, they consistently generate it with a terabyte. Then it stays there.
“Nothing is being done with this data, and that just seemed crazy to me,” Dan Wright, CEO of startup Armada told Forbes. “Once I got into the problem of bridging that digital divide, I couldn’t help it; I just couldn’t stop.”
Armada has spent the past year building what it believes is the solution: a full-stack technology platform that brings AI grade computing capabilities to industrial devices that might benefit from them. A big piece of that: building on top of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. While other startups have leveraged SpaceX in their strategies for mining or manufacturing in space, Armada believes it’s the first to be built on top of Starlink, SpaceX’s network of internet-provider satellites. Its software suite, Commander, includes tools for managing and connecting Starlinks and other internet assets to ensure connectivity in remote areas.
Armada also offers its own and third-party app store to work with the data generated on-site (think sensors that alert of pending mandatory maintenance or unplanned visits to a remote mining site). Then, the hardware: a weatherproof mobile data center in a box called Galleon that can have compatibility on the back of a flatbed truck and can space GPU racks, or graphics processing units, that are a must-have for running AI models.
While startups like OpenAI and Anthropic have raised billions of dollars in a race to build bigger and more powerful AI models, Armada is one of the most promising of another wave of startups looking to unlock their capabilities for business uses far from Silicon Valley or an Amazon Web Services data center. Cofounded with Jon Runyan last December, Armada already employs 60 people in the Bay Area and Seattle, where it’s hiring away from the cloud and AI staff at cloud heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft.
Armada has no consumers beyond a proof-of-concept, which means its profit remains 0 so far. But investors are positive about opportunities in energy, production and mining, and defense. In January, venture capital firms Founders Fund, Lux Capital and Shield Capital led a $15 million investment circular in Armada that valued the company at more than $50 million. Last month, Armada raised another $40 million in a Series A investment circular led by recurring investor 8090 Industries that included both the budget and new ones. investors Felicis, Contrary Capital, Marlinspike Partners, Valor and Koch Industries.
Armada’s valuation already stands at $250 million after funding, a source told Forbes. Armada declined to comment on his assessment.
And with ambitions to score contracts with the world’s largest industrial players and the U.S. Department of Defense, Armada represents a high-difficulty, high-upside new act for Wright, who was last seen in the public eye resigning from his previous role as CEO of AI software unicorn DataRobot in July 2022 amid layoffs and an insider trading scandal. Wright declined to comment on that situation beyond a written statement. But with Armada, he believes he’s back with technology that can be a major picks-and-shovels provider in delivering real results from the AI boom.
“We want more corporations to try to solve problems where, if the generation works and the company is successful, the world will be a better position for them,” Wright said. “I hope other people see Armada and say, ‘Hey, this is whatever the world would like. ‘”
A group of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites passing over Uruguay in 2021.
Armada debuted at a private convention hosted by SpaceX’s lead investor, 137 Ventures, in Park City, Utah, in November 2022. One of the company’s partners had been toying with imaginable advertising uses for Starlink, even filing several patents. . But SpaceX, expected to be valued at $175 billion in the private market, had other priorities besides building a software stack on the most sensitive of its satellites or launching a new line of hardware products. With the blessing of local executives, the company approached Wright, an agent after the DataRobot controversy a few months earlier.
A trained lawyer (he worked with co-founder Runyan at a Bay Area law firm serving startups more than a decade ago), Wright was a general suggestion in App Performance Manager AppDynamics when, two days before its scheduled IPO date in January 2017, it was surprisingly acquired through Cisco for $3. 7 billion. Wright had been promoted to chief operating officer before leaving for DataRobot in 2020, where he became CEO the following March. Meanwhile, Runyan was coming off a long tenure as general access manager Okta suggests, most notably its IPO in 2017.
For what could turn out to be a complex, capital-intensive business with multiple products and a giant base of target visitors who aren’t used to working with startups, Wright and Runyan seemed like ideal founders; According to investors, their networks more than compensated. a deficit. In-depth AI studies or direct experience with hardware. As technical leaders, they temporarily recruited CTO Pradeep Nair, former vice president of engineering at VMware and Microsoft’s Azure cloud division, and AI director Prag Mishra, who led AI and technology. device learning for Amazon’s healthcare unit and in the past was a research manager at Microsoft.
“It seemed like the right time and the right team,” said Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens. “A lot of times these really complicated tech problems end up being overvalued, and the business side of the equation gets undervalued. Armada has a great deal of competence in both.”
And investors were unfazed by Wright’s departure to DataRobot, where he and other executives resigned following an internal inventory sales report through executives, Wright added, that he hadn’t been made to be part of the core staff.
“The other people involved said they wanted to work with Dan again, which in the end was a very positive sign for me,” said Shahin Farshchi, Lux’s general partner. “There was nothing about this experience that could give me less confidence in Dan’s ability to accomplish this, in his ethics and in his ethical compass,” added Trae Stephens, spouse of the Founders Fund.
Wright declined to answer Forbes’ express questions about his tenure at DataRobot. “My track record of contributing to the creation of successful generating corporations speaks for itself,” he said in a written statement. “I’m looking forward to moving into the current leadership of DataRobot in any way I can and applying the classes I learned there and at AppDynamics to build a generational business at Armada with our amazing team.
A close-up of a Navy galleon.
Made out of multiple layers of interior lining and and a reinforced outer casing of military-grade heavy gauge steel, a Galleon can fit on the back of a truck or rail car for its journey to a far flung location; there on a trailer or level ground, it can be up-and-running within 48 hours. The real value, however, is what’s inside: in the standard 40 ft. Galleon, six racks of computer processing units, or CPUs, or GPUs; in a 20 ft. version, the housing for three.
Armada has an operational Galleon in its Seattle office, where it runs a number of artificial intelligence programs as part of demonstrations, but for now it’s unclear how many are active in the wild. When asked to connect Forbes with customers, Armada brought in Nexa Resources. a publicly traded mining company that is currently conducting a proof of concept, CIO Marcelo Alves Santos said via email. Setting up remote knowledge centers in mines can take up to eight months, according to Santos. The collaboration with Armada offers the prospect of more efficient, faster and more adaptable operations, an important step forward from our existing capabilities,” he said. But Armada later clarified that Nexa does not currently operate any galleons in the field.
A further-along trial is happening at a well-known media company, whose executive in charge asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak in an official capacity. There, Armada’s Commander software suite, and specifically its Connect software for managing Starlink satellite usage, is proving the difference between the SpaceX satellites serving as a primary source of internet connectivity for streaming live events. By bonding up to seven Starlink terminals (on-ground receivers working with the satellites) together as one, the media company can ensure a high bandwidth baseline it couldn’t by working with SpaceX alone, the person said.
“If you’re on the front lines of Africa, there’s a lot of knowledge to send to a knowledge hub on Amazon’s east coast,” the user said. “We can get richer content with a smaller footprint. “
SpaceX responded to a request for comment. Armada called its relationship with SpaceX a “close collaboration” but declined to answer express questions.
This media company is also exploring the use of other Armada software, notably an artificial intelligence program organization called EdgeAI. Products in the EdgeAI suite come with a tool that can automatically detect and analyze motion in streaming videos; others can process automated narration in real-time. Managing those responsibilities at their source can allow an event transmitter to perform more local calculations, such as measuring the length of a wave or the distance of a launch, and identify the best camera angles to return.
Other programs internally and through partners would likely have greater business value, such as filling in the data bureaucracy required by regulators or giving maintenance advice before an emergency occurs, the company said. At least one railroad company, which Armada declined to name, is testing the use of its apps to scan and sort boxes at a transit center; Armada is also contemplating uses in wildfire prevention and other security uses where the sensors’ knowledge is only analyzed after an emergency, Runyan said.
David Dunaway, a retired vice admiral and former commander of Naval Air Systems Command, said he was interested in how the Navy’s generation can help the military stream video to make faster and better decisions, such as whether to shoot at an antenna. Fight mission. Dunaway is actively advising Armada on its strategy before the Department of Defense, where the startup is bidding for the first contracts. “It’s been the bane of our existence — we’ve deployed a lot of high-quality assets, but now there’s not enough bandwidth to get things done,” Dunaway said. “No one else is leaving out these kinds of calculations,” he added, referring to the operational spaces closest to combat zones.
Of course, it can take years to secure such contracts. Stephens, who is also a co-founder of Anduril, a defense-focused startup that reportedly sought a $10 billion valuation in October, noted that Anduril has its own computing power housed in its autonomous aerial vehicles. And some other previous investments through the Founders Fund, publicly traded Palantir, are already being executed with U. S. government clients. It is a major role model for the U. S. and heavy industry to supply artificial intelligence software. At least one SpaceX investor who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said he refused to invest in Armada, fearing his generation would be matched too easily through competition over time.
This further explains why Armada and its founders make a call for themselves – and boast of their credentials as a large corporation – before a competitive land grab. “You can’t come and go out of Stanford and run these kinds of businesses. ” said Runyan. Dan and I have been building networks in Silicon Valley for 20 years. “