Today, Brown insists, their lives are considerably less cinematic, filled with surfing, working out, and time spent with their kids. “We don’t do the ridiculous Silicon Valley lifestyle,” he says, “We’re going to be cool and crush it.”
For Harpoon, “crushing it” means being the MAGA VC firm—focusing exclusively on companies “building for America.”
“Another way to say that is America first,” says Brown. “Even though it’s not really a political thing, it’s just, are you focused on America or not?”
“It creates this cool kids’ club where you’re only in if you’re building for America,” Brown says. Unlike consumer software, he argues, defense investing is inseparable from Washington.
As a result of this mantra, Harpoon’s investment portfolio includes companies that are building autonomous submarines, “drones in a box,” satellite maneuvering systems, postquantum cryptography, and technologies for locating critical minerals using seismic data instead of drilling. Brown says the firm also explored investing in an Israeli start-up developing underground munitions capable of tunneling beneath targets before detonating, but that deal ultimately fell through.
“We find ourselves today with, luckily, really, really amazing technology being deployed to the war fighter in a faster and better way than we would’ve been stuck with had we just let the big primes continue with their modus operandi,” Windle tells me.
Even off the battlefield, Brown argues that some of these new technologies—such as a drone defense system that he says is currently in the works—could change American lives. “I don’t go to concerts or any outdoor events because we are absolutely not prepared for the drone threat,” Brown tells me. “I specifically didn’t go to [the U.F.C. fight at the White House] even though I was invited because I don’t do outdoor events.”
“We want to make guys as safe and as lethal as possible, in that order.”
Defense tech has exploded in popularity since Harpoon’s creation, in 2018. According to PitchBook, VCs deployed $19.8 billion into defense tech across 262 deals in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2024.
“We can use the current venture capital incentives to really help push defense tech to the forefront,” says Windle, “But our goal at Harpoon is because we still have buddies that are in, guys that I brought into the military are still in—we want to make guys as safe and as lethal as possible, in that order.”
Harpoon launched its own accelerator in April of 2025, spearheaded by Couillard, called Black Flag; if selected, early-stage defense start-ups receive investments from Harpoon, as well as potentially from Shield Capital and the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel (IQT), and are connected to a network that extends from Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Amodei’s Anthropic to the Pentagon. And there’s real money to be made—these nascent defense start-ups are raising multiples from 17 times to 50 times revenue, according to Fortune. These surging valuations have some investors worried it’s a bubble, but Windle argues that every area of VC ultimately becomes a bubble due to herd mentality. After years risking their lives in the armed forces, Windle also argues that SEALs are able to understand and address threats in real time and coach young founders—some of whom didn’t even go to college—through the feeling of danger involved in high-stakes investing that can be similar to what they experienced on the battlefield.
“It creates this cool kids’ club where you’re only in if you’re building for America,”
