Investing in Chariot Defense
a16z leads Chariot Defense's Series A
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 0700 hours.
For most of the morning, the exercise ran by the book. Drones rotated through reconnaissance patterns, radar swept the tree line in low-power mode, and the command tent glowed with layered video feeds and maps. A few quadcopters were cycling faster than expected — landing, swapping batteries, and relaunching. The tempo held, but reserves were thinning. Then a radar operator leaned forward and tapped his screen. “Possible contact,” he said.
The response was immediate and automatic.
One drone was dropped onto a fast charger to turn it quickly for deployment. Another was launched to get a closer look. The radar shifted from standby into active scan. The electronic warfare system powered up and began transmitting probing bursts. Inside the tent, additional sensor feeds came online and an extra compute node spun up to process imagery locally instead of pushing it back to a distant server.
All of it happened in under a minute. Twenty meters away, the generator’s steady hum thickened into a strained, uneven growl as load spiked sharply upward. Then the lights flickered.
One of the charging banks tripped offline. A laptop went black and began its slow reboot cycle. The radar feed froze mid-sweep for three long seconds before snapping back to life. Quickly, people started yanking plugs and powering down anything deemed “nonessential” to stabilize the load.
There was plenty of fuel stacked beside the vehicle. That wasn’t the constraint. The unit wasn’t short on energy in the abstract; it was short on deliverable electrical power at that exact moment. Nothing had been shot down, nothing had been jammed. The systems faltered because the power architecture couldn’t absorb a sudden, stacked surge in demand.
That quiet limitation — generators pushed past their comfort zone, breakers tripping under spiky loads, batteries draining faster than they could be turned, extension cords spiderwebbed through mud — is increasingly shaping modern conflict across the force. It also points to something larger and harder to ignore: the American military is increasingly dependent on electronic systems, but its battlefield power infrastructure was designed for a steadier, more mechanical era. It was certainly not built for a force that runs on robots, sensors and software.
Chariot Defense is on a mission to change that, and we’re proud to announce our investment in their Series A.
Power is the Problem
Drones, electronic warfare, edge compute — these are just some of the systems defining the next era of conflict. They all share a common dependency: electricity. And not the calm, predictable kind.
Their demand profile is jagged and unforgiving. A jammer draws sharp, high-intensity bursts of power for seconds at a time. A laser demands sustained, high-power output, and then drops to zero. Multiple drones touch down and plug in simultaneously, each pulling aggressive fast-charge loads. Compute requirements surge as sensor feeds stack, fuse, and generate targeting decisions in real time. These spikes don’t arrive neatly spaced apart; they compound, overlap, and hit all at once.
Legacy generators or batteries were never designed for this world. Generators are optimized for steady-state output. Size them for peak demand and you create loud, thermally visible, fuel-hungry liabilities that are difficult to move and easy to detect. Size them for average demand and systems collapse right when you need them.
Batteries have the opposite problem. They can deliver power instantly and handle surge far better than generators, but they are fundamentally constrained by capacity; in high-demand applications or extended missions, they drain quickly and become dead weight until replenished. Compounding the challenge, there are relatively few American-made, field-ready energy systems available, and in practice many units fill the gap by purchasing commercially available batteries — often Chinese-made — from retailers like Home Depot because there is no alternative that is as accessible or easy to deploy.
As the war machine becomes electric, control over fielded power electronics and batteries becomes a national security issue. These are not passive components but software-managed infrastructure, programmable systems with programmable contingencies. When people say logistics wins wars, they traditionally mean fuel and munitions. Increasingly, it also means reliable, responsive power at the tactical edge. The side that controls power where and when it’s actually needed controls the fight.
The Power Prime
For these reasons, we’re excited to invest in Chariot Defense as they work to become the military’s power prime.
Chariot integrates high-voltage batteries, advanced solid-state power electronics, and orchestration software into mobile systems purpose-built for the edge. Their architecture buffers sudden spikes, smooths volatile loads, and dynamically allocates electricity across competing systems in real time. Instead of forcing operators to manually triage what stays on and what shuts off, Chariot turns battlefield power into a software-defined infrastructure layer.
Founder and CEO Adam Warmoth built Chariot at the intersection of advanced energy systems and real-world military operations, assembling a team with experience from Anduril, Tesla, Archer, and the U.S. Army. Admittedly, Adam was difficult to pin down for an initial call — he spends more time in the field, at live demonstrations, and alongside operators than behind a desk. And that proximity to the user is exactly why we believe he’ll be successful. The most capable power architecture in the world is useless if an 18-year-old soldier can’t operate it under pressure. The product is being shaped under real constraints, not in a conference room.
It’s also important to be clear about what this is and what it isn’t. This is not a climate play; combustion isn’t going away. Diesel and jet fuel will remain foundational energy sources for decades. But increasingly, combustion feeds electrical systems rather than directly driving mechanical ones. Vehicles become mobile power plants. Units become microgrids. Capability becomes a function of how intelligently electricity is generated, stored, conditioned, and routed under stress.
Over the past several years, we’ve invested in many of the platforms driving this electric shift, underpinned by incredible technology breakthroughs in the electro-industrial stack. As platforms scale and move from prototype to widespread deployment, one constraint becomes impossible to ignore: none of them work without resilient, responsive power at the edge. Chariot is building the electrical backbone that keeps them in the fight.
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