In a world where billion-dollar defense budgets still get tracked in Excel and PDFs are passed around like state secrets, someone had to step up and say, “Enough.” That someone is Obviant, and they just locked in $7.1 million in seed funding to make chaos in the defense market a solvable equation.
Founded in 2021 and run with precision by Brendan Karp (CEO) and Dylan Taylor (Co-founder), Obviant is the data intelligence platform built to decode the $1T+ U.S. defense machine. This isn’t your garden-variety SaaS tool wrapped in patriotic hype. The platform doesn’t just show you the map, it shows you where the treasure is buried, who controls the gate, and where the money actually flows. From budget justification books to Congressional sidebars and contracting spaghetti, they pull it all in, clean it up, and serve it back with machine-speed insight.
So who saw the vision? Shield Capital, that’s who, leading the round with a play straight out of their national security playbook. They’re joined by an A-list syndicate that reads like a who’s who in deep tech capital: Motivate Venture Capital, A Capital, New Vista Capital, Aloft VC, and Underdog Labs. These aren’t tourists, these are the firms that bet early and bet smart on founders building the next frontier of intelligence and autonomy.
And smart money doesn’t chase noise, it chases traction. Obviant’s already serving defense-first startups, prime contractors, investors, think tanks, and federal agencies. They’ve built a system that manages 120M+ vectors, with sub-50ms query times, and it’s pushing 40+ queries per second in prod. In partnership with Pinecone, they’ve taken vector search from science project to war room standard.
This isn’t about dashboards. It’s about speed, clarity, and control in a market where the stakes start at billion and scale up. The team isn’t trying to revolutionize defense data, they’re doing it, one query at a time, one insight ahead of the next contract cycle. They aren’t just aggregating documents, they’re aggregating power.
With this round, Obviant is scaling the team, leveling up the AI, and expanding its customer base across a defense ecosystem that’s finally hungry for clarity. It’s not just the right product at the right time, it’s the right minds building it for the right fight.
