Vannevar Labs | LinkedIn (original) (raw)

Defense and Space Manufacturing

Palo Alto, California 12,303 followers

Silicon Valley technology for the country's most critical national security problems

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About us

Defense for the digital age.

Industry

Defense and Space Manufacturing

Company size

51-200 employees

Headquarters

Palo Alto, California

Type

Privately Held

Locations

Employees at Vannevar Labs

Updates

12,303 followers
8h Edited
Today Vannevar Labs announced the transition of the company’s prime contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) from a prototype contract to a production scale contract. This production agreement will field capabilities developed under the prototype agreement for exquisite sensing capabilities that enable DoD teams to identify adversary activity, manage their forces’ signature, deliver effects, and assess the impact of those effects in strategic competition. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/ehrarSsK
Our CEO Brett Granberg recently presented at a Founders You Should Know event, where he shared our vision with top engineering talent. Some takeaways on why you should join us: 1. We're working on solving critical national security problems, today. 2. You'd be working with badass people. 3. We're profitable. You can check out the full video below. If any of the above resonates with you, we're hiring for full stack engineers, ML engineers, forward deployed engineers, and more at https://lnkd.in/gZsvR39H
Brett Granberg - Vannevar Labs

https://www.youtube.com/

Vannevar Labs reposted this

Cofounder & President at Vannevar Labs
1mo
When Katherine Boyle and I first met in Silicon Valley in 2019 - we were both outsiders. Katherine had left a career in journalism to become a venture capitalist. I was a former intelligence analyst raising capital with my cofounder Brett after forming Vannevar Labs. We shared a deep belief that the best mission veterans and Silicon Valley engineers and product people in the world needed to be working on defense problems. Katherine was looking for what she calls serious founders with serious ideas and committed the first institutional capital to Vannevar. It was a non-consensus bet when building for defense was not popular. Five years later, Katherine and I shared the stage today at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference with Michal Lev-Ram to bring America’s top business leaders Inside the Defense Tech Revolution—subtitle “defense tech is having a moment.” The moment is the massive shift going on across the Defense Department and US government pivoting from two decades in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency toward fighting in strategic competition. At each massive moment in our country’s history, the best talent in America has answered the call—whether in World War II or the Space Race. At Vannevar, our team is building capabilities to enable the US and our allies to compete today so we never have to fight tonight. The stakes have never been higher.
Vannevar Labs reposted this

Cofounder & President at Vannevar Labs
1mo
Shared the stage with several long-time builders in defense this week at Stanford speaking about Building Startups for the Future of Defense. At Vannevar Labs - we believe the future of defense will be defined by how we perform in non-kinetic competition to "bend the line" away from armed conflict. We are facing the most complex national security challenge from an aggressive nation state competitor since the Cold War. Our focus is on building capabilities with our defense partners that advantage the US in the non-kinetic domains most contested in strategic competition today—intelligence, sensing, information operations, and interoperating in these domains with our allies and partners. There’s no more exciting or important area in national security. CC: Akhil IyerCameron McCord Ian Cinnamon The Stanford DEFCON Technology and National Security Student Network
We recently partnered with Databricks to build custom fine-tuned models for identifying and measuring adversary narratives in foreign news and social media. Check out the post and article below to hear how Cane Punma and our machine learning team improved the model's accuracy to 76% and decreased latency by 75% by building a compound AI system leveraging Databricks Mosaic AI. If you're interested in working on similar problems at the intersection of AI and defense, check out our job openings here: https://lnkd.in/g7TPqJ-M

GenAI Alliances at Databricks Mosaic
2mo Edited
I 🤩 love a good customer testimonial especially when they have real data points around #GenAI in production. And this one is great: Vannevar Labs used Databricks #mosaicAI to build custom fine-tuned Mistral AI models for sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis was across news articles, blogs and social media from a range of languages, some of which are low-resourced languages like Tagalog. By clearly defining the use case, creating a high quality fine-tuning data set to match and fine-tuning on Mosaic, they were able to improve accuracy to 76% and decrease latency by 75% and have a model ready to deploy in just 2 weeks! 🙌 As Cane Punma, Senior ML Engineer at Vannevar pointed out, they started with #GPT4 models, much like many people do, but found that the cost and latency was too high and the accuracy was only around 65%. Awesome to see the power of #opensource #LLM enabling fine-tuning and adaptation. Thank you Cane Punma, Nate Bush and team Vannevar Labs for partnering with us. For anyone interested in #defensetech and #innovation you should check this team out, they are hiring. Jude Boyle | Aaron Kinworthy | Tim Lortz | David Weaver | Arjun Rajput | Stewart Sherpa | Emily Hutson
Vannevar Labs databricks.com
Vannevar Labs reposted this

Head of Design @ Vannevar Labs
2mo
I'm so pumped to be growing the design team at Vannevar. We're a small and scrappy crew with big impact and a blank slate for defining how design operates. I've only been here a month so far and my mind is sufficiently blown on 3 levels: 1. We have a top-tier team of engineers that execute like no other. 2. Our mission focus means every single person at Vannevar obsesses over our users. 3. The value our tech brings to users is legitimately staggering. Ping me if you want to learn more—I'm biased, but this is a cool opportunity.
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Tushar's latest blog post shines a light on how our forward deployed engineers turn urgent mission needs into enduring products. "Building successfully for this world requires developing empathy for it, and the only way to do that is to spend time with end users. You need to understand their missions deeply and use that understanding to drive what you build." This is what we call extreme outcome orientation – delivering quick wins that evolve into lasting solutions. Read more here:

Engineering at Vannevar Labs
2mo
Building a defense startup is hard. We're sharing some of the lessons we've learned at Vannevar Labs about setting up the engineering team to cover multiple products and customer groups. In particular, I walk through building the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function. FDEs are engineers that embed with users, deeply understand their missions, and fuel that understanding into inventing new products and capturing programs.
Forward Deployed Engineering blog.vannevarlabs.com
The Vannevar Labs team wishes you a happy and safe Independence Day!
Our co-founders Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick recently joined Noah Sheinbaum on Crossing the Valley to share what they have learned while building the company. When asked how Vannevar turns customers into champions, Brett explained: “That kind of relationship you only build by being really useful to start.” “That is what we do – we orient to support that person’s mission and help [their] team push the boundaries of what they’re able to accomplish.” Learn more about how our team is building the first non-kinetic defense prime, and tune into the whole podcast episode here:
Vannevar Labs is aiming for $1 billion in revenue by 2030. 💰 They are one of the fastest-to-profitability defense tech stratups... ever. 🚀 And their founders, Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick, are two of the most candid, caring, and driven in the industry. This week's #CrossingTheValley is an absolute masterclass in what separates innovation theater from mission-impact. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts, and read on for some top takeaways 👇 1. Peers are the real support network of a business school… not (necessarily) the professors. Outside of the Hacking for Defense ecosystem, Brett got an icy reception from professors when he spoke about dropping out of Stanford. One went so far as to say, “if you drop out, I’m not going to help you.” 2. You can fundraise with problems and users… you don't (necessarily) need product. The world was different in 2018… but the Vannevar team didn't have a prototype. They had a deep background and extensive network of end users because they chose to solve a problem that they had experienced personally their previous lives. This made it easy for them to pick up the phone and get together with users who understood the problem deeply. 3. The best "first" deal is the first (real) deal you can get. “Whatever you can get, the fastest you can possibly get it, is what you should go after.” But crucially (and this will stand out from the typical deftech startup), they deprioritized SBIR, innovation money, and anything that sounded like innovation money or research funds. If it wasn't real money, it wasn't an important enough problem. 4. "Selling" in defense isn’t about sales… it’s about solving a problem with a customer who lacks existing capability. Many of the areas the team focused on were new to the government; they didn’t have to focus on competitors, and they didn’t have to obsess over a business model - they had to figure out what it would take to make the problem go away, and then deliver. Check out the full case writeup on Frontdoordefense . substack . com for the complete list of lessons and some 🌶 quotes!

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Vannevar Labs | LinkedIn (original) (raw)

Defense and Space Manufacturing

Palo Alto, California 12,303 followers

Silicon Valley technology for the country's most critical national security problems

About us

Locations

Employees at Vannevar Labs

Updates

https://www.youtube.com/

Join now to see what you are missing

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