Our Investment in Adyton

For a $757 billion annual budget¹, I was surprised how many systems in the Department of Defense run on pen, paper, and manual desktop entry: vehicle check-ins in the field, daily musters during a mission at sea, private/seaman/airman training, equipment monitoring, and beyond.

Work has moved to the cloud, and to the edge, in every field. Information systems need to be real-time, adaptive, and secure. Fields as far flung as ride-sharing, oil/gas rig monitoring, and electrical grid management use cloud-based systems with edge computing software to ensure uptime, security, and usability. This type of technology is a matter of safety for servicemembers, productivity for their managers, and national security for the United States and Allied organizations. The largest software providers for the DoD, the big 5 defense contractors, have historically been focused on on-premise software, software for physical weapons, and cybersecurity². But the simple work — communication, cloud storage, collaboration — is just as important, if not more so. The tools we take for granted in our day-to-day — spreadsheets, shared calendars, collaborative databases — are a generation behind at the largest employer in the world.

On some level, it makes sense. Healthcare providers have, since 1996, had the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), to protect patient data, and to ensure the security of any system that interacts with health insurers. As a result, every hospital, provider network, enterprise software system, and mobile app in healthcare considers and runs HIPAA compliant applications and databases. There are companies, in fact, who specifically build HIPAA-as-a-service platforms for developers to publish software on. There is no HIPAA-as-a-service for the DoD, and the security and privacy considerations are, perhaps, even more critical.

The security requirements are case-specific: security clearance varies by department, by individual personnel member, and by situation. The DoD is actually five different entities (Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard, Marines) with their own reporting structures and collaboration processes. The tools that may work in one setting may not work in another. Information security for a handheld device in the field is profoundly different from on premise on base. “Bring your own device” is not a trivial matter. These are hard business, cultural, and technical problems that no company had been able to adequately address the last decade: until Adyton.

James and J.J. are decorated veterans, public servants, and technologists. They have been in the field on missions as servicemembers, have seen the opportunity to level up their own experience as customers and end users, and from their time at Palantir and BCG respectively, have designed solutions for the same customer base that they serve today. Their team brings incredibly deep expertise in mobile software development, infosec, cybersecurity, and enterprise SaaS. It has been remarkable to watch the development of a world-class, consumer-grade product at their hands. It has been even more exciting to see it deployed across every branch of the DoD, used in the field as a way for servicemembers to communicate, collaborate, and save lives. Their flagship product, Mustr, has been the first case study of product led growth within the DoD that has truly achieved adoption and scale, serving tens of thousands of users across land, air, and sea. The Adyton platform can now be used across the organization, and ushers in a new era of “military-grade” security for enterprise systems. In a more collaborative and complex world than ever before, with information systems at the center of it, this way of thinking about business and products is a matter of urgent priority.

It was an honor to be part of their pre-seed round of investment with our friends at Initialized Capital, to double down, and to now be joined by Khosla Ventures for their latest round of financing. This is a case where we have learned far more from James and J.J. about the world than the other way around, and we are humbled by how bold and ambitious their work is, and how simple the solution set is. They are, by the way, hiring. Run, don’t walk. So much of the comfort we take for granted comes at the hands of tireless work that is enabled by their technology. We thank them for their continued service on behalf of the public.

(1) https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2023/FY2023_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf
(2)https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2023/FY23_Green_Book.pdf