Even mid-sprint to a secret flight, the Navy’s tech chief has a pitch for investors

Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, says his office is trying to make the service simpler for startups and investors to work with by clarifying where it will spend and by co-investing rather than funding all early research internally. He recounted how the Navy’s publication of longer-term technology priorities last year influenced investors’ expectations and said a refreshed priorities list has now been vetted by several unnamed venture investors before release. Fanelli described a shift in sourcing: the Navy increasingly purchases from later-stage commercial firms — typically Series D through F — instead of running seed-to-Series-B research programs itself. He framed that as a conscious decision to turn early-stage risk over to private capital and to provide a cleaner demand signal so investors know what the Navy intends to buy down the road. Taking an equity stake remains an uncommon, more aggressive form of co-investment; more often the Navy waits for products to mature commercially before procuring them. He listed several recent acquisitions intended to illustrate the approach. This month the Navy awarded a $562 million contract for the MQ-25 Stingray autonomous refueling drone. The service has also purchased edge compute hardware from Armada, contracted Gecko Robotics for inspection tasks, put Domino Data Lab in charge of its machine learning pipeline, and replaced a delayed contractor camera system with commercial cameras and Applied Intuition software — a change Fanelli said shortened deployment time by roughly four years and expanded coverage across more ships. Fanelli noted that buying decisions are routed through small source selection committees designed to keep the process merit-based, and he reiterated a familiar constraint: promising technologies inside the service can fail for budgetary reasons if they do not replace an existing expense. Alongside his remarks, Fanelli shared an updated internal priorities document, jointly issued with the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Mission Systems, that highlights broad areas for investment such as applied AI and quantum information science as places founders and investors should consider building next.