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Crossing the ValleyLessons from the trailblazers who forged a path from Research to Production in the Department of Defense Author: Frontdoor Defense
Few companies make it from pilot to production in the defense market. Those who do often change the industry in the process. How do they do it? What lessons can startups take from their trials, successes, and failures? Crossing the Valley tells the stories of the trailblazers who are forging a new path for America's defense. www.valleycrossers.com Language: en Genres: Government, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Ep. 78 - How HavocAI is solving a $2.3B problem
Episode 78
Wednesday, 8 April, 2026
About BenBen Cipperley spent 26 years in the Navy. The first 18 he served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal office, with three tours across the Indo-Pacific, three years between Iraq and Afghanistan, and command in Guam. Which is to say, he has more experience than most.What makes his background unusual isn’t the operational experience; plenty of veterans make the transition. It’s the Pentagon chapter that came after. A fellowship at the Stimson Center led to a resource sponsor role writing the Navy’s budget, which led to being pulled onto the team drafting the 2022 National Defense Strategy (mid-process, while Russian forces were marshaling in Belarus). Which led to working under the CNO on what became the Navy’s first force design document in 50 years. It’s a classified vision for the fleet in 2045 that, he notes, had quite a few robots in it.He put an “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn when he retired. The CEO of Havoc called him 20 minutes later.About Havoc AIHavoc AI is a collaborative autonomy software company. The pitch is deceptively simple: one operator, thousands of autonomous systems. The technology is the connective tissue, the software layer that lets a surface drone, an aerial drone, and a ground vehicle share a common operational picture and respond to commands from a single interface, rather than requiring separate operators, separate control systems, and separate data pipes for each platform.The company was born from a conference convened by then-Undersecretary of Defense Heidi Shyu around the concept of “Hellscape,” IndoPaCom’s deterrence concept for a Taiwan scenario involving massive swarms of autonomous systems. The question in the room wasn’t whether the platforms existed. It was: how do you make thousands of them work together when a human brain can only track so many things at once? Founders Paul Lwin and Joe Turner quit their jobs the next day and started building the answer.Early validation came through Silent Swarm, an exercise run by Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. Havoc showed up with 12 prototypes of their Rampage platform. Representatives from NIWC Atlantic watched, then bought the prototypes on the spot. Those units shipped to Portugal to support Task Force 66. That’s the loop Havoc is now trying to close, and why they recently acquired Mavrik (air) and Teleo (ground) to make good on the multi-domain part of the pitch.The business model is worth understanding clearly. The government is bad at buying software. It tends to need software wrapped in a hardware container before it can conceptually acquire it. Havoc has internalized this and partnered with eight different maritime platform builders, plus air and ground hardware partners, so that their autonomy stack arrives pre-integrated with best-of-breed hardware. They’re not trying to be the OS layer that makes everyone else’s platforms work together. But they’ll sell you the hardware too, because that’s how you get the check.For more about Havoc AI: https://havocai.com/Follow Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencipperley/For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.comFollow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/Crossing the Valley explores the journey from proof of concept to production in defense technology. New episodes weekly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com
