GPS-Denied Autonomy, Synthetic GPS, VICTUS with Jesse Hamel

0:00Jesse Hamel: Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callye Keen. Today I have Jesse Hamel of Victus. Jesse, I'm really excited to turn out with you about Alt-P &T and why you can't jam gravity. But before we get into what problems you're solving and all those fun technical bits, same question I ask everyone, what are you passionate about right now?

0:22Callye Keen: Passion is an interesting word, but I trade that typically with conviction. and my my conviction for my professional life right now is starting you know starts with a national security focus that i've had you know for 20 years in the air force and a couple years after that founding a company in defense tech and dual use was that i think there there this is an interesting time in technology and in kind of the human arc really it's a very interesting time and there's all kinds of amazing things that are happening and which is also bringing all kinds of new perils. And one of them that I'm deeply convicted on that, although imperfect, I think that it is existential for both Americans and even the globe that the U.S.

1:10Callye Keen: really lead and dominate when it comes to intelligent robotics, super intelligence, and the systems in place to make that happen. That's kind of a core conviction. So that conviction then is for me, then it became, it was more of a decision of like, well, how can I support that conviction? As much as I talk and we all talk, right? It's about being a man of action. How can you take action and do that? So my great way of taking action for that was to found a company to solve kind of a piece of that problem set that the system just wasn't solving. The system just wasn't solving. So I think that That's ultimately one of my primary convictions that I'm acting upon.

1:55Callye Keen: And again, if you go back to this just in a powerful, powerful time that we're living in, and in some cases, we don't appreciate just how fast things are changing. And that means a couple things. It means we've got to lead on this. The free world has got to lead on this, or we will lose these freedoms that matter. And it also means that the people that are in leadership and key kind of instrumental areas in anything technology right now, in just broader tech, now more than ever, we need people that have kind of a vision and a character that will be able to deal with very new questions that we've never had to answer before as a species.

2:37Callye Keen: So what we don't need are people of low character trying to grapple with these new questions that are popping up. So that also is why, in my mind, this is one of the most influential areas where I could go into and just take action to ultimately support that conviction.

2:54Jesse Hamel: One of our taglines is builders wanted, and I'm really passionate about creating not just new technology, but building the industry, the ecosystem, the connectedness to be accretive to those goals. A friend of mine just said something really interesting, and I'll see if I can not butcher this. There's so many legacy people, large companies that are in the interest of protecting IP and protecting and securing secrets, whereas America's superpower is in creating new secrets, is in building. And I thought it was, wow, what an interesting way of looking at this is, of course, national security is important.

3:33Jesse Hamel: But this is, to me, this is the time of builders. I've never seen a time where people have more interest in developing new things, building new things, getting involved. That conviction note that you said, that's where that really lands for me, is this is the time to build.

3:52Callye Keen: Yeah, I agree with you. And in some cases, other people have said this, but it's a good way of thinking about a premise, I would say, a hypothesis for kind of what I'm doing now is that this is also, this is the age of AI and robotics. is the age of ar so if you believe that premise both of those things potentially especially ai but robotics as well they're they're both basically levers so this is i would you know to your point of like okay this is the age of builders part of the reason is that if that's true and i think it is true but if that's true it's because we have tools that you know the egyptians that built the pyramids would have loved to have had they didn't have this kind of leverage So we have the ability to use AI automation robotics, and it's only increasing.

4:43Callye Keen: And that gives that, that is a, you know, maybe an overused term is like democratizing, but that like, that gives power to builders, whereas, you know, it gives power to be able to build with much lower capital requirements in some cases, way less money required to build something, way fewer people in some cases. Incredible speed. incredible speed yeah way less time right time is everything you know all kind of all the above and that i you know i think there's probably i think you know building and creating is innate to the human condition and the levers that we have that's why i'm still very much an optimist despite the potential perils of a lot of tech it it it's just enables people that would not have joined the modern builders guild, if you will, they wouldn't have joined that 10, 15, 20 years ago because those levers weren't there.

5:37Callye Keen: And even my company right now would not have been, the way we're operating it right now, which just would not have been feasible even at all 10 years ago, just would not have been. And it just, so this kind of hyper-enabled high agency way of building and even the people that join or every person building, I actually think that is a true, That's very true. And it's a cool part of the time we find ourselves in right now.

6:03Jesse Hamel: I want to chase this a little bit because you have an incredible background from your service and education. But walk me through the decision process of why I found a startup. Take those skills to Lockheed Martin, to an existing company. I've met you, so I have a pretty good understanding of why. But let's get into it, man.

6:24Callye Keen: Well, one, you have to be mildly insane. Maybe even more. Like to found a company. Probably full. Maybe never go full maybe. But you have to have a few screws loose like you just do. I say that in jest but also not. You have to be what you actually very much have to do. I see a lot of this. I see a lot of this. Classmates of mine and other people at MIT within the kind of ecosystem. And you see this actually a lot. they romanticize entrepreneurship and founding a company and they're they're at their corporate job you know making their making their wage doing their thing and they fantasize and romanticize of what it would be like they don't make the jump because of the opportunity cost and because they don't want to chew glass every day for 18 months the first 18 months you know which is literally what it takes so that there has to be this to make the decision to do it and there there's a series of things that probably have to happen.

7:24Callye Keen: I'll walk you through mine in a minute. But there has to be this kind of, whether it's a catalyzing event or something within you that just isn't satisfied with a W-2 position in a certain company doing something. There has to be this very dissatisfied kind of sense to you. And that might be because you have this invention and idea that just keeps gnawing at you and you're sitting at your nine to five job and i'm not trying to put any of this down or you know or maybe working much harder than that but you're sitting at a

7:56Jesse Hamel: corporate job and and it just keeps gnawing at you it's just not like you just i've like i just

8:03Callye Keen: got to do something with this but what i find is there's actually a lot of people in that position if i if i went to raytheon or northrop or meta or pick pick your company there's a lot of people in there with an entrepreneurship type spirit and idea. Hey, what if I did this? What if I tried this? What if I did this? What if I did this? And that's actually growing. That's not enough, though. Most of them will never act on that idea. So that's be something else that catalyzes that. So for me, I've always just, you know, my history is that I kind of jump on things. Once I make a decision, I just move out.

8:38Callye Keen: So I joined the Air Force after the attacks of 9-11. I was a junior undergrad business major, you know, planning to do the investment banking thing, which seemed pretty lucrative. Right. I would have, you know, taken care of stuff for a while. You work hard to about 35, get your yacht and then you're done. If all works out and made a very different trajectory. Didn't know how long I'd serve and I've served for 20 years, all active duty, flying gunships, doing a bunch of commanding drone squadrons all across the world and all across all kinds of stuff. It was kind of a, all right, here's the environment.

9:10Callye Keen: the environment has changed i'm going to go all in and like go for it there has to be that kind of like piece of you want to do that so that was kind of catalyzing for me and then as i you know made the decision to retire which was also a mini insane decision just kind of based on trajectory my career was on we kind of abruptly retired right at 20 years and then uh you know went back to academia and then and ended up founding the company out of there i tested hypotheses which I think a lot of people do. Took a job interview at a large Defense Prime, looked at a few other ones, and it just was not for me.

9:46Callye Keen: And that became very obvious to the point of halfway through a multi-day interview process calling HR saying, thank you. I can't do this anymore. I'm flying back. Like that kind of thing. So that solidified my mind of like, all right, I'm not going to feel professionally fulfilled. I don't feel like I'm actually making a difference for my convictions back to that part within a corporate world. Then it becomes kind of a series of de-risks, right? Financial de-risk and opportunity cost. Can I assemble the team? Can I get, you know, all these kind of like de-risk things. So what I, and I actually encourage anybody that's in, there might be people thinking about this.

10:24Callye Keen: There are, there might be thinking about this. Like what I did and I got early advice on the, to do this. And it was the right move, which you kind of create a hypothesis. a business is like a science experiment in a way in a very positive way and you create a hypothesis and find a way to test that hypothesis you won't it won't prove that your business is going to work it won't prove that like you know there's it's not like you take away the risk but you can construct an experiment to see if you're the right person to found that company so the other thing that this is an mitism and it's totally true the kind of that i really lean into and i still I tell everybody this that I'm into right now is that a good founder has to have two things has to a passion for the subject material like you just care about that material like you just you love it so you have you know whatever it is like you just you just love it you you would do it for free you would think about you know my case I would think about autonomous software precision, location, and applications on drones and other systems for free.

11:34True.

11:35Callye Keen: You have to have that. And then you have to have this unfair advantage that the market will reward you for doing this. And that's the difference between a hobbyist and somebody who could actually make a living from this, right? And the market's very cruel on these things in a very good way. You can be a great person with a great idea, but if there's no asymmetric advantage, the market will punish you. It will punish you. And it is cold and relentless when it comes to that. So having those two things, I kind of formed a hypothesis of like, I think I have those two things for this kind of company, which is actually really important.

12:09Callye Keen: I use this example, like, and I'm actually like, I care about this sector a lot, but at this point in my life, this might change in the future, but at this point in my life, I've stayed away from everything, healthcare, when it comes to a business perspective. Why have I stayed away from healthcare? I don't know anything about it. And it's fraught with all kinds of risks that I don't understand. So I've just, nope, I stay away from it. From an investment perspective, operational perspective, stay away from it. It's highly regulated, like just kind of stay away from it. So that helped me narrow down my hypothesis of like, is Jesse Hamill at this year in 2024, I found Invictus, the right guy for this company?

12:47Callye Keen: It's kind of all three of those things. You might be the right guy, but it's the wrong company, the wrong time. Even this happens all the time, right? You might be the right person, right technology or the product, but the market isn't there. It's not ready yet. You're too early, et cetera, et cetera. You can be all that. Those things that kind of all have to line up. So I constructed a hypothesis, try and line that up. And what we ended up doing, just to be simple, we ended up doing like a week-long hackathon at MIT. It was part of the structure I did. And it was real, had real risk capital folks, real entrepreneurs in residence.

13:21Callye Keen: You know, it was kind of a bigger thing they did for about a week and we did well at that. And I was able to, that was where, that was my final test of the hypothesis of like, am I the right guy for this kind of sector, this kind of technology at this time in this year, this epoch that we're in. And because of the.

13:44Callye Keen: It only cost me a week of effort. That's it. that was the de-risk for me to be like, okay, I have the indicators that yes, I really do have asymmetric advantage here and I like doing this. So that's where I kind of had, you know, other things I was doing in my portfolio from consulting and advising and all that. I basically fired all them, powered down all of that, and then paper the company and just went all in, you know, went all after that. So that, that was not an immediate process. It was a process strung about by learning that I wasn't going to be comfortable in a larger company after I transitioned out of the military.

14:21Callye Keen: And then also refining this type of company for me doing this kind of thing, does that meet all these three things? And then literally testing that at a hackathon was kind of how I came to that conclusion. Yeah.

14:36Jesse Hamel: I have a massive belief around founder product or founder market fit. Everybody thinks about product market fit. With an early stage team, especially in defense, and I'll get into why this is in a second, but especially around defense, if you have an incredible team with all of the advantages of building right now, it is about what skills, background, and personalities you're bringing to the team. it's less so early on is do I have the perfect idea? It's really it is. Do I have the right people? And I think that this does scale up as a human capital problem. A lot of technology problems really aren't technology problems.

15:18Jesse Hamel: They're human capital problems. It's like, do I have the brainpower to solve this problem?

15:23Callye Keen: Yes.

15:23Jesse Hamel: But in defense, there's this other particular layer to it because there are skills that can be acquired with experience. There are skills that can be purchased and acquired with experience. And then there's a whole set of skills that can only be acquired through service experience. And so when we look at founders, so Kform works with people in a couple of different areas, but it's very tightly focused on defense. And with really early stage companies, there's the only thing to look at is to look at it like I would have an accelerator or as an investor. It's like, here's the team. If they're trying to solve this problem, Do they have unique operational experience around this problem that gives them unfair leverage where you replicated by money?

16:09Jesse Hamel: Because if you're solving a problem that can be solved with money, there's usually somebody that has more money, especially when you're a startup. And so, you know, I look at your background and it's like, okay, this makes a lot of sense because you're in a high leverage position where you have a lot of knowledge that you may get from being in the industry for 30 or 40 years, but not lived experience. And I think this cannot be undersold to founders and founding teams is understanding the problem that you solve. For me, my personal version of this, and this isn't who we work with, but my personal version of this is there's a whole crop of advanced manufacturing startups, like people coming out of Y Combinator.

16:53Callye Keen: Yeah, your idea is pretty good, but that's called an ERP system.

16:57Jesse Hamel: And that's been invented 10 zillion times. And most of these companies are out of business. So the thing that you're describing is exactly already a thing and you should go work in the industry a little bit more. But with defense, you can just 10x or 100x that. It's like you can't just go get a job flying an AC-130, right?

17:18Callye Keen: Right. Yeah.

17:19Jesse Hamel: So so it doesn't matter who you are, how much you pay. You can't get that experience. And so looking at your team or your founder problem fit really is it's the world. In my experience working with startups for the last 20 years, it's like that is the differentiator. Do you have the right people? And then do they have the right problem? Is it like a secondary question?

17:42Callye Keen: But I agree with the people I agree. I agree with the problem. yeah and the other the other part like the founder market fit piece of it this sounds squishy too but i've really like it but paradoxically it is not and it is some kind of and this is where like there are those there are those outliers where you'll have somebody from outside an industry come in with new ideas and actually make something disruptive work yeah that's definitely outlier That's definitely not the norm. Because normally they're going to recreate the wheel, like you just kind of alluded to, with advanced manufacturing. I think they've discovered something that has already been done and tried and wasn't that interesting.

18:24Callye Keen: But the part of, and this is maybe, I don't know if you call this founder market fit, but it's just maybe it's founder investability. And founder investability, you've got to be able to correlate and understand in yourself first. because as a founder, I'm the principal investor in Victus Technologies and always will be. Because what did I invest? Not just like a bag of money. I put my life into it. I literally put my life into it. So I am, no matter what, I will always be the principal investor of this company. So am I going to invest my life into it? Part of your own kind of just understanding of your self-awareness is you count the cost before you go to war.

19:06Callye Keen: Have you counted the cost and understand just how painful it's going to be to birth a company from zero to one to 10 to 100 to 100 billion. And clear-eyed understanding what that Mount Everest is going to look like, and then deciding to do it anyhow. That's the founder of investability. And I'd be very concerned about a founder who hasn't demonstrated that they can look at a really nasty problem, scope it this is how i'm going to climb mount everest and then has done it you know has actually like moved out and done it and that that's also where i think uh and this is kind of tangential but not totally because you mentioned like yc or other accelerators there are there's there's a couple different style in defense tech right now like venture-backed companies and one of them is what effectively looks like the ultra high net worth investors get together and say we want to take a bet on X.

20:04Callye Keen: And they don't mean a person. They mean a capability. We want deep strike weapons in our portfolio. We want this in our portfolio. And they're thinking of balancing a portfolio, knowing that most of it's going to zero, but one of these will hit. So they just want all their bases covered, right? And they will birth out companies on this. I think those companies are very high risk. That's very high risk. I would not put capital in those kinds of companies. the reverse is what victus was which is somebody from that world who had lived that problem set and understood it innately said i'm going to solve this thing and you guys can get in line and support me if you want to if you want me to make you a bunch of money and that's it like but we're going to do this no matter what with or without you we're going to do this and the investors come to you so there's the the investor launched companies and then the other ones where the founder truly is founding it and they just attract the investment in because I, you know, through FOMO and all the other reasons that people end up investing there, there's a two very distinct type of investors or type of like companies.

21:10Jesse Hamel: I'll leave my hot takes for off the program about investor led technology companies in defense, but, but it's very real, right?

21:19Callye Keen: Yeah. It's very real.

21:21Jesse Hamel: There is a serious problem with venture capital. And part of the reason launching this podcast, this show, was people were entering the market as new market entrants on the capital side and on the technology side. And I wanted to bring on friends of mine, investors that were serious people that were successful and kind of very people along the way. But it's very interesting. But let's just say I have very specific lines on what I think about venture capital and by extension, private equity or family office money. And a lot of people are going to lose money. And I think a lot of good companies are going to get funded.

22:01Jesse Hamel: It's just there's winners and losers. but the thing about leverage it works for investors too that's all i'll say yeah yeah no that's but what what i want to get into is your mount evers like you saw a problem and you launched a company very interesting technology so i want to get into the problem that you saw

22:21Callye Keen: and the solution that you're bringing to bear yeah so you know the um first half of my career was largely just combat back, combat back. You're racked up somewhere around 800 combat hours in gunships. And, you know, this is all global war on terror kind of times, you know, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban is what we're thinking about. And we knew in those days from a technology perspective, whether it was a manned aircraft, a manned ship, a drone, you know, Predator, Reaper, other kind of drones are, you know, all flying around with me, you know, and or a weapon. all kinds of different missiles, bombs, et cetera, guided munitions.

23:04Callye Keen: We knew there was a reliance on GPS. We knew this. Nobody cared back in those GWAT days. Nobody cared because there really wasn't anybody challenging GPS. It was largely, it was, it was, you know, there wasn't a lot of jammers, very few. It's a very rare, bespoke kind of thing. It was almost no spoofing, basically no spoofing and interestingly enough uh there's some weather scientists that have really written some interesting stuff on that the between the years about 1990 and 2020 was this 30-year epoch of very calm solar activity very few flares very few of these like gamma bursts and emps that come out of the sun that disrupt communications and satellites and all that very very loud that's all changed now that's all changed which we're regularly getting um weird space anomalies which is actually the norm that 30-year epoch was a abnormally quiet period so you took the fact you didn't really have enemies jamming it you didn't really have nature and the environment inhibiting signals fast forward to where we are now and now like you and i could take our iphone and uh go make a jammer in a couple hours uh and it's basically anywhere right like we all can do this The knowledge is so low that you can look up stuff on it.

24:21Callye Keen: It's very doable now. Very, very doable. And the nature of GPS, I kind of analogize it to the early days of the internet where we didn't think we needed encryption. We're like, oh, that's good, right? Everybody's going to be up above board. There's no blind actors. No one would ever do anything to this. And that's kind of how GPS was and still is, really. so you know we're always going to be able to get this very faint signal from medium earth orbit all the way down to earth or the earth's atmosphere uh to be able to do location with that and timing and a couple of things that gps does it's pretty critical so that's all kind of you know gone now now when i when i go to dc when i talk to elected reps when i talk to policy people I talked to military, I talked to him like at this point now, you know, in fall of 2026, we're recording this right now.

25:11Callye Keen: Nobody questions that GPS jamming and spoofing is a very real problem like that. And even in the history of Victus, I, I, I found a Victus in spring of 24. There was a lot of people that are aware of it in 24 because of Ukraine. And, but now it's to the point where everyone's aware of like the reliance of it. I don't have to spend any effort on that. So it was a problem set that I had seen and had thought about quite a bit. I coupled that with I'd experienced it as well, GPS anomalies in flight and then later as a drone squadron commander. And that kind of set the stage for if you just think visually, be like, okay, what kind of world are we heading into from a national security perspective?

25:56Callye Keen: Where we're not thinking about Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban, these non-state actors. instead we're thinking about large nation states that have access to basically everything that we have in most cases have stolen the tech that we already have and have the ability to jam or spoof or deny from orbit to seabed like i mean like basically wherever we want they want how does that change the american way of national security and then even broader into commercial aviation commercial maritime and it's a fundamental change like it's a fundamental like this is the true Achilles heel where you, the U S now these billion dollar weapons, billion dollar aircraft, uh, carrier strike groups, um, commercial planes, commercial maritime, all this that just becomes crippled by these very low cost jammers that are almost impossible to stop.

26:47Callye Keen: Like almost impossible because of how fragile GPS is as a system itself and always will be the nature of it, the physics of it. So those are things I kind of, I spent a lot of time understanding, thinking about. And then I coupled that with, I started getting involved with machine learning in about 2015 while I was living in Europe. And that's where this idea of like, instead of a new sensor or a new satellite constellation or some other atomic clock or something that we bolt onto a device to take place when GPS is not available and still allow it to know where it's at so that it can accomplish its mission.

27:27Callye Keen: What if we harvest the data that's already on board everything, that's trapped because the old school algorithms, the Kalman filters, the kind of linear algebra and multivariate calculus that's used, and we've been using since the 60s since Dr. Kalman invented today was never designed to harness what if we took and created an agent that could interpret that was fine-tuned just to interpret that raw data and then from that onboard data that's based on kind of like i think you said earlier that is based on gravity it's based on like how i move what if i could just tell where i am in time and space just based on how i move and is that a massive unlock for the broader autonomy, architecture, national security apparatus.

28:17Callye Keen: That's how we kind of got to the point that we're at and how I invented the tech and founded the company.

28:22Jesse Hamel: It's an incredible space. What immediately I think of is the proliferation of applications of that technology coupled with what you were talking about earlier is now we have all this AI and robotics and we're at the beginning of a autonomy boom. But we're still building this boom on the backs of very fragile generation or multi-generation old technologies.

28:49Callye Keen: 100%.

28:49Jesse Hamel: And I think immediately of fancy sensors that we're building or that we had guests on the show with incredible technology. And then we're just pushing that back over the same radio lengths that we might have had 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago. similarly we've been fortunate enough to work on incredible rf projects big ones small ones and then you think when it comes down to it the way that they time together there's only a couple of startups in the entire market that are solving and looking at new ways of uh of doing timing same thing with navigation same thing with just movements or position of full things and it's a It's just a very interesting space.

29:37Jesse Hamel: But for Victus, I think the temptation is to look at it and say, oh, this is a drone thing. This is a drone problem, right? We're going to put this on. OK, maybe it's going to get really good and we'll put it on fast drones. We'll put it on interceptors and hypersonics. But the reality is that we're right at the beginning. We're basically obsessing over really, really nice hobbyist quadcopters right now. And we're, you know, and, and attritable missiles, just cheaper, smaller missiles, right? It's like, okay, we're at the very beginning of what you're going to see with autonomous ground vehicles and humanoid robotics and larger flight vehicles.

30:18Jesse Hamel: What we will see in five and 10 years, I think is equally unpredictable, but what is easy to predict, easy to predict the future is like fragile base systems that we're building on is this horizontal layer that it needs to get hardened. So that's what really gets me excited about what you're doing because it's kind of like the old BASF commercials, right, about plastics. It's like we don't make the product that you buy. We make the product that you buy better. I think of that every time I think of your company.

30:55Callye Keen: Yeah, no, that's actually a great analogy, and I agree. the um what that's that's actually been an exciting part now too because we you know we started with we started with group one drones so your hobbyist quadcopter the first drone we ever had was a um a px4 mod drone that's used for basically like fifth grade stem education like that's what's for it's just a hobbyist drone right but on the early bootstrap kind of days these you could buy on a you know shoestring budget you can buy these things it's a little harder for me to buy an F-16 or a JASM or a Columbia class submarine. We're getting there, but we're not there yet.

31:32Callye Keen: So, you know, we started with that, but there was also a market, right? There's a, there's a kind of a ready market, but I totally agree that. And we're, what's actually been really exciting, especially this past summer, this past summer, we had our first demonstration in the maritime space on a boat, unmanned surface vessel. We're about to do one, the subsurface space and we've actually um has a pretty interesting uh traction now in like manned aviation uh and then that also includes you know weapons uh which you know the difference between a the difference between a precision missile and a drone is pretty narrow anymore basically which one is it depends what you want to call it it probably all works the same in almost every capacity so that i totally agree that that has been that's been exciting for us and that expansion The other domain that's gotten very interesting is ground robotics.

32:24Callye Keen: So you've seen ground robotics using Ukraine a lot more now. The U.S. Army has gotten really into this. I think my take on this is that they were kind of at the hobbyist. The Department of the Army was kind of a hobbyist for ground robotics about two years ago, but it's really changed. We did our first phase one integration with a couple different UGVs with the Army just a couple weeks ago, which is pretty cool. what's cool for us from a technology perspective, whether it is a satellite in LEO, whether it's a Boeing 737 or a drone or a hypersonic missile or an unmanned surface vessel or a yacht or a Columbia class submarine or a UUV or a humanoid in your house, they all do location the same way, like identically the same way.

33:14Callye Keen: So our software and our technology that our patent calls a synthetic GPS, that has this kind of very wide applicability to it. So our place, and because your point's silly, like our place, the way we've thought about it, and we're really in that like domain expansion part now, is we start with drones because one, I can actually buy them myself, right? They're not that expensive. I can buy them. We can do stuff, you know, in the early days if something go wrong and crash. It's not that big a deal. You put another one up, whatever, right? That becomes a little bit different when you're talking very big systems.

33:49Callye Keen: So you get past that point, which we got past that point, like summer of 25. And then so you can start working on these other domains. So this is actually a big emphasis for us over the next six months, six to 12 months, is continuing to get to other domains. My goal after the seed round, we closed our seed round back in March of this year, March, April of this year. And my goal is to get to multiple domains, which we got to by August at multiple domains. And now we're just continuing to expand it. So I kind of think of it as like a sideways XYZ axis. The start was the drone piece. That was like our enter.

34:26Callye Keen: And then we're deviating from there to get higher up all the way to Leo. And we have some plans to do that. That's pretty cool. And then to get much farther, deeper, into 2000 meters below the sea, like beyond that where they have the same kind of problems obviously gps doesn't penetrate the water but the the problems with all the subsurface domain is that basically everyone on commercial whether it's commercial undersea vessels that inspect fiber optic cables and go plats um they just like a scuba diver they don't want to have to keep surfacing to get a gps fix which is what they do now they go down they operate for a little bit they go back up they stick a probe for the water get a gps fix oh now i know where i'm at again and then go back down super inefficient and then in the combat space as soon as you surface and put the probe through the water now everybody knows where you are you know you're there's stealth beneath the water but there is not above the water so they both are you know really really focused on like how can i operate without having to use gps the same technology is a little bit different span a little different like um domain on it but that's um that's some of the stuff that we're thinking about a lot to your point of like much bigger than drones so we see our we see ourselves an autonomy company america's autonomy company as well solving uniquely like american problems to support the american way of war which is different than other nations i think this is actually important this is different than other nations we support that primarily and then then from there we think of okay you think of like the i say this to investors a lot the um the kind of classic curve where you have early adopters circled here and then it goes up to like fast followers and then laggards like for the customer one you know we see here as like the u.s military government agencies in this kind of area giving that unique capability towards them solving very real problem sets and then then eventually we get to the point where we're in commercial maritime commercial aviation because we're seeing that we have we have it's not uncommon people don't realize this it's not uncommon for you to be on a plane where it's cheap they lose gps sometime in route and the pilots just have to hope there's good weather or if they can you know navigate with old school navigation means if this happens over the water it's a very different situation uh it's not uncommon for notums get filed on this emergencies to get fought uh in-flight emergencies to get filed passengers in the back i have no idea no idea they don't tell them i i was told by a maintainer for gulf stream so these are g5s right they're flying ultra high net worth folks around.

36:58Callye Keen: There are some locations they go to regularly that they have to pull the circuit breakers for GPS one and two so that it doesn't corrupt the flight management system when they take off and they take out visual due regard. If you're a pilot, you realize like that's extremely rare. And in most cases, it's something you never want to do. You have to have good weather for it. You know, it doesn't give you all the safety backups that we're used to. So there's a risk being assumed there. That's some of the things we're starting to talk about as we talk about our technology and approach to it. The other point, you mentioned one too, and this is coming up a lot, is we exist in, Victus is like a go-to-market sales and as a technology is really more where we solve.

37:42Callye Keen: We are part of the autonomy stack. I see it as a circle, like the autonomy stack. And the way I think about that is just a made up kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I got a triangle hierarchy of needs. and up here I have what an agent needs to be thinking about which is what am I doing what's my mission in life what decisions should I be making where should I be going like what should I do next these are these higher order higher cognitive thinking autonomy parts of the autonomy stack what is the foundation of that triangle is the where am I so on the autonomy piece we solve that where am I that enables all of this higher order thinking because you can have all this higher order thinking if i don't know where am i don't matter don't matter anymore so that's the autonomy piece the other part we tend to exist in is what a lot of people a lot of folks will call alt pnt or alternative position navigation and timing alternative position navigation and timing generally is just an acronym that's used to be anything other than gps that's basically what it means anything other than gps right and it's it's been this kind of uh goofy hasn't worked throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall with some DARPA projects and some other stuff to see what works.

38:57Callye Keen: None of it does. We have a guy we're talking to who spent 25 years in PNT at some of the highest levels of Department of War and U.S. government agencies. And he's passionate about working with us. And one of the reasons is, his own words is that he's an old PNT guy. His own words. I'm sick of just being the bearer of bad news. It's time for us to solve this problem. It's time to solve it. And that's where that, oh, so we're in the autonomy circle. We're in the alt P and T circle. That's where that circle has kind of been. If you break down P and T position, navigation, timing, that's worth doing even for a second.

39:33Callye Keen: So position defined as like where I am right now. That's what our technology through synthetic GPS as a machine learning state estimator solves uniquely from gravity. Navigation then is largely just predicated off of the position. The navigation is pretty easy if I know the position, right? Because then it's like, okay, I know go to this, to this waypoint, to this waypoint, to this waypoint, back to this waypoint, for example. But that's part of it. So navigation, there are sensors and routes that need to happen for that. But that's typically not the challenge. It's positioning. So the end is pretty well solved.

40:11Callye Keen: And our software solves it, obviously, as well. But there's other ways to solve that, too. The T is another one that's kind of interesting. The T is painful. So the T is painful. So, you know, just like nerding out on GPS a little bit. GPS was the, I believe this to be accurate, was the first, it was an invention. I think it was the first invention that actually proved Einstein's theory of relativity. So it proved this because GPS is based off timing from a signal coming way up in medium earth orbit that's then received. As it travels at near speed of light, as it travels at that speed, we have to make minor adjustments to the reception of it, and those calculations are based directly upon Einstein's theory of relativity.

40:54Callye Keen: If you don't have that calibration, GPS never works. So GPS was the first like pragmatic, to my knowledge, the first pragmatic like application of a theory of relativity is very real. Like it's very real. This isn't a theory. It is the fact of relativity. So GPS based on that, because of that, it's this very precise atomic clock that has to be that timing has to be very precise that's why we use the timing for all kinds of stuff gps becomes gps as a piece of metadata is often encoded in our our transactions it's actually encoded in almost every banking transaction it's encoded in definite aviation things where you pass what you call a track from one one entity to another which is like a drone saying i'm here an F-16 saying I'm here, a JASM missile says I'm here.

41:47Callye Keen: The timing piece of that is how you correlate. Mesh networks are based off of timing. You know, timing is very critical for mesh network. So this is another piece that GPS brings. And when you're jammed and spoofed, there's real challenges to that. And this is an area where we're looking at even kind of growing into. So our machine learning state estimator was primarily about solving the P in P and T. we then tangentially also solve the n the navigation because that's pretty easy once you have the positioning solved you just need your vector and our accelerant you know our measurement of accelerometers can give you that and other kind of tools can pretty easily so the t is the other one that's interesting and what we have is um there's some areas that we're kind of expanding into this i won't get too far into that but areas we're expanding into that where machine learning can derive very precise timing which i think is actually really interesting and that i think is the future even expanding beyond solving just the p and the n is that t that we use without even realize it we use it we use we time stamp all kinds of stuff and it's done off of off of gps but that that's the way we're you know as we approach this problem set our our initial mentality is this within robotics i'll take robotics but this is applicable anywhere there is this engineering kind of tendency to bolt on ever more sensors and onto a blob with no brain so you end up with this blob of a million eyeballs and servos all over it and the intelligence isn't there we view we view this as a more anthropomorphic like a human that only has five senses but we have this very complex interplay in our prefrontal and more that interprets different parts of our senses at different times to give us awareness, right?

43:39Callye Keen: Hence the reason if I close my eyes and go like this, I don't fall over because there's this immediate transfer between my inner ear, between some of the wind I feel on my face and my memory that remembers kind of my orientation, but I can also feel it as in a way an accelerometer in my head feels the movement and feels that happening. And that all is interpreted in a certain way. So our approach is that in almost any case within robotics, drones being another flying robot and every other robotic system, we already have the kind of sensors that we need. We actually, in most cases, not all, but in most cases, we have the sensors that we need.

44:18Callye Keen: The real alpha is in developing unique ML models and fine-tuned agents that can interpret that trapped data into something that is sense-making on board that system?

44:31Jesse Hamel: Most certainly, humans are optimized for perception versus collections. And so we see this exact same problem as, hey, I need a thousand sensors. But really, most of the problems are an interpretation, perception, or orchestration issue. So like E is actually a perception and orchestration problem. It's not really a sensing problem. And a lot of the harder to get problems fall into that category. So that's why that piece, and I dropped a little hint earlier, is very interesting to me from a deployed sensor perspective is I want to be able to time and orchestrate a group of sensors. But there is inherent problems with that that we're seeing right now, same problems that you'd have with really any comm system.

45:23Jesse Hamel: So finding novel ways of just knowing where that sensor is and where that sensor is relative to other sensors. There's a massive upshift of the capabilities, whether that's something simple like a vision system or more complicated like an acoustic system or much more complicated like an RF system. Knowing where it is is kind of important. But I'll leave it at that because I know this is going to get into secret sauce, making secrets. They said before, Arias. Jesse, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to jam with me and speak on the Startup Defense.

46:02Callye Keen: Thanks, man. No, this is awesome. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. So let's do it again soon. Awesome.

46:08Jesse Hamel: My name is Callie Keene, and this has been the Startup Defense.