Vannevar Labs was founded in 2019 by Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick, both of whom worked inside the U.S. intelligence community and at In-Q-Tel before deciding to build modern software for national-security missions that legacy primes had neglected. The company's thesis is that the most consequential defense problems facing the United States and its allies are software problems: collecting and making sense of vast multilingual, multimodal data streams, and increasingly contesting the electromagnetic spectrum.
The company's platform ingests open-source intelligence, foreign-language media, dark-web activity, and signals data, then applies natural-language processing, computer vision, and machine learning to surface threats and patterns analysts would otherwise miss. Vannevar's tools are used to monitor adversary activity, detect influence operations, and support targeting and maritime-domain awareness, with a particular emphasis on the Indo-Pacific theater and great-power competition.
Beyond intelligence analysis, Vannevar has expanded into non-kinetic effects and electronic warfare software, positioning itself to deliver capabilities across the collect-decide-act loop. The firm embeds engineers alongside operators to build mission-specific workflows, a model borrowed from commercial software rather than traditional cost-plus defense contracting.
Vannevar raised a $75M Series B in January 2023 led by Felicis, with participation from DFJ Growth, General Catalyst, Point72 Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Shield Capital, valuing the company in the hundreds of millions and bringing total funding to roughly $90M. The company has won numerous program-of-record and prototype contracts across the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, and has grown into one of the marquee software-native defense-tech companies recruiting talent away from traditional primes.