Post by Admin on Aug 30, 2019 5:33:49 GMT
Pentagon to VCs: Invest in Small Drones
The Pentagon still hasn't stood up its matchmaking service that will link vetted investors with firms that make technology that the U.S. government sees essential to future weapons, but hopes to kick off the effort in October, Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said during an Aug. 26 briefing at the Pentagon. The goal is to get U.S. investors, not Chinese ones, to invest in companies with this tech.
Why the delay? Officials had planned to build a website to link venture capitalists and technology firms. "[W]e scrapped the idea, frankly, of a complicated, expensive website, and decided that what we wanted to do was to have face-to-face meetings and do more of them on very, very focused topics," Lord said.
Defense officials will be traveling to "different cities around the country convening groups where we would invite the capital providers, as well as the industry representatives," Lord said.
"We're working on who all those people are right now," she said. "And then we would provide a mechanism for them to work with one another. Now, the idea is we do not promise business to any of the businesses that would be there, but these are areas where we definitely have a strong demand signal."
The first sector the Pentagon will look to have these venture capitalist invest: small drones.
"It's because where we are right now in terms of having our entire U.S. marketplace eroded, and also because it's very intuitive, people can understand what these small quadcopters are and so forth," Lord said.
[W]e don't have much of a small [unmanned aerial systems] industrial base because DJI dumped so many low-price quadcopters on the markets," she said. And we then became dependent on them, both from the defense point of view and the commercial point of view, and we know that a lot of the information is sent back to China from those. So it's not something that we can use."
