Shield AI

Shield AI, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Diego. Its most recent SEC EDGAR filing is a Form D/A dated January 8, 2024, disclosing a Regulation D offering with $500 million sought and $300 million sold to 21 investors as of the filing date ¹. The board of directors identified in that filing consists of Ryan Tseng (CEO and Director), Brandon Tseng (Executive Officer and Director), Peter Levine (Director, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the American Dynamism practice), Gaetano Crupi (Director), Daniel Gwak (Director), Doug Stiles Philippone (Director), and Andrew Berlin (Director) ¹. Levine's board seat reflects the depth of the a16z relationship: Shield AI appears on the American Dynamism 50 list and is a named portfolio company in the $1.176 billion dedicated defense/national security fund that Andreessen Horowitz launched within its January 2026 $15 billion raise ⁹.

Disclosed investors across Form D rounds include Coatue Management, Andreessen Horowitz (American Dynamism), and ARK Invest ². Coatue's private portfolio position in Shield AI is not reflected in its quarterly 13F-HR public equity disclosures, which show zero defense prime or defense technology company holdings; the Shield AI investment exists entirely in Coatue's private portfolio alongside SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI ⁶. The company was last publicly valued at approximately $5.6 billion ⁶. Revenue reached approximately $200 million in fiscal 2024, up 64% year-over-year ².

In September 2025, Shield AI incorporated Shield AI UK Ltd (Companies House number 16696206) at C/O Womble Bond Dickinson (UK) LLP, 4 More London Riverside, London SE1 2AU. The entity had filed only three documents as of its most recent review. Directors are Kingsley Afemikhe (British national resident in the United States, appointed September 5, 2025) and Michael Yang (American, appointed September 23, 2025). No Persons of Significant Control data had been filed at time of incorporation check ¹⁰. The UK entity is the company's first documented Five Eyes jurisdiction footprint.

Shield AI holds 20 documented federal contracts totaling $52.1 million in obligated value from USASpending data retrieved March 2026 ⁴. The largest block is five DHS task orders for U.S. Coast Guard shore-based V-BAT deployments totaling $18.2 million. The second-largest is a single Air Force contract (FA864920C0158, $16.4 million) for COVID-era reinforcement learning research for autonomous systems. The Navy holds a $7.9 million V-BAT VTOL aircraft contract (N0001925F0971). A Hivemind software contract ($1.83 million, FA865822CB011) and an autonomous capabilities award ($4.48 million, FA228023C0008) round out the Air Force footprint ⁴.

Total federal spending across DoD and DHS stands at $65 million, split roughly evenly — $33.8 million DoD and $31.2 million DHS ³. This places Shield AI substantially below its peer companies in the same investor networks: Anduril at $2.32 billion, Palantir at $3.42 billion, and SpaceX at $14.6 billion in documented federal obligations ¹¹. The disparity likely reflects the stage of the company's contract development and possible reliance on Other Transaction Authority and SBIR mechanisms not fully captured in the USASpending database, as well as the $8 billion EWACC IDIQ position that represents ceiling authority rather than obligated value ². An Army AI aviation SBIR award of approximately $4.2 million is separately documented ².

Across fiscal years, the documented DoD obligations show a pattern of accelerating engagement: FY2024 and FY2025 awards have grown relative to the earliest contracts, with FY2026 showing $3.7 million in early-year obligations ¹². The primary programs — V-BAT VTOL UAV, Hivemind autonomous AI behaviors, and shore-based Coast Guard deployments — span three distinct mission types: maritime domain awareness, Air Force R&D pipeline, and ISR for border and port security ¹².

Shield AI's investor base creates a documented overlap between investor financial interests and Pentagon procurement authority. Five Trump administration appointees disclosed financial holdings in Shield AI in OGE 278 public financial disclosure filings ⁷. The appointees are not individually named in the finding, but the number matches the scale of Anduril (8 appointees), SpaceX (7), and Coatue (7) — all significantly higher than traditional defense primes, where no such pattern appears ⁷.

Emil Michael, confirmed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USD R&E) in May 2025 and also serving as Acting Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), served as a senior advisor at Coatue Management from October 2018 through his Pentagon nomination in December 2024 ¹³. During that advisory period, Coatue made its Shield AI investment. Michael committed only to the statutory 18 U.S.C. § 208 minimum recusal upon taking office; Senator Warren requested a broader recusal scope ¹³. USD R&E is the primary Pentagon advisor on technology development and prototyping — the office that oversees the programs awarding contracts to autonomous systems companies including Shield AI ¹⁴.

Coatue's private portfolio position in Shield AI sits entirely outside its 13F-HR public disclosures. Its Q4 2025 13F shows $40 billion in public equities with zero positions in defense primes, defense IT services, or Palantir ¹⁵. Shield AI's valuation, along with SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI, constitutes Coatue's undisclosed defense and AI technology concentration ⁶. The CTEK vehicle — rebranded as the Coatue Innovative Strategies Fund and anchored by $1 billion from Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell — provides high-net-worth retail investors indirect access to this private portfolio, extending exposure to this private portfolio beyond institutional investors ¹⁶.

Scott Kupor, the Andreessen Horowitz managing partner who serves as director of the Office of Personnel Management under the Trump administration, disclosed net worth exceeding $182 million and remains associated with a16z's American Dynamism fund, which holds Shield AI as a portfolio company ¹⁷. The USD R&E and OPM conflicts are distinct in character — the former involves direct technology acquisition authority, the latter involves personnel appointments — but both are held by individuals with financial ties to Shield AI's investor network ⁷.

Shield AI has filed 100 Lobbying Disclosure Act reports disclosing $6.85 million in federal lobbying expenditures between 2018 and 2024 ¹⁸. This total makes Shield AI the second-highest lobbying spender among the seven defense tech companies analyzed in the investigation, behind only Anduril ($7.95 million) and ahead of SpaceX, Scale AI, and Palantir. According to these filings, all of Shield AI's disclosed lobbying is classified as defense-focused ¹⁹.

In 2021, the company established in-house lobbying capacity, registering SHIELD AI as its own LDA registrant and accounting for $4.15 million of its total disclosed spend. Disclosure records indicate the shift to in-house lobbying coincided with the engagement of multiple external firms in the same year: Crossroads Strategies, JA Green and Company, American Defense International, C Baker Consulting, and Liz Williams ¹⁹. J.A. Green and Company also appears in SpaceX lobbying records ²⁰, reflecting the shared roster of defense-focused lobbying firms across the Silicon Valley defense technology sector.

LDA filings list CHRIS MILLER among the lobbyists registered on Shield AI's behalf. Christopher Miller served as Acting Secretary of Defense from November 2020 through January 2021. The available evidence does not conclusively confirm the lobbyist is identical to the former Acting SecDef — verification of that identity remains an open research task — but lobbying records show a coincidence of name and defense focus ¹⁹.

Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Israel joint strike campaign against Iran beginning February 28, 2026, was described in contemporaneous reporting as the first large-scale AI-coordinated military operation ⁸. Shield AI's Hivemind software was reported to have piloted autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) platforms during the operation. Anduril's Lattice software managed drone swarms alongside LUCAS kamikaze drones, and Palantir's AIP platform provided intelligence fusion and strike direction. The three companies — all portfolio companies of overlapping Silicon Valley investors — were simultaneously fielding technology during the same operation ⁸.

The operation occurred against the backdrop of the Iran war supplemental spending discussion that began March 3, 2026, with Congressional leaders confirming emergency munitions replenishment funding would be forthcoming ²¹. Shield AI's position in a conflict producing demand for autonomous drone operations parallels the broader expansion documented across the defense technology network — Anduril's $22 billion IVAS novation, Palantir's $10 billion Army AI contract, and the $13.4 billion FY2026 allocation for the Golden Dome program ²². Shield AI holds a documented position on the Golden Dome-aligned SHIELD IDIQ contract vehicle, which carries a $151 billion 10-year ceiling and was awarded to 2,100+ companies in two tranches in December 2025 ²³.

Hivemind's reported combat use, if confirmed by official records, would represent a milestone for the company's autonomous flight technology. The combat deployment claim is based on contemporaneous news reporting rather than official government documentation ⁸.

Shield AI is one of 17 defense-specific companies named on the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism 50 list for 2025, which the firm describes as 'Companies Shaping the Fight of the Future' ²⁴. The list functions as a16z's forward signal of which companies it expects to benefit from defense spending. Other named defense companies on the list include Anduril Industries, Castelion (hypersonic weapons), Forterra (autonomous military vehicles), Saronic (autonomous naval vessels), and Vannevar Labs (national security AI) — nearly all of which hold positions on the SHIELD IDIQ and have received documented federal contracts ²⁴.

The aggregated federal contract value flowing to a16z American Dynamism portfolio companies exceeds $23 billion when Anduril's IVAS novation is included, with Shield AI's $72.1 million in total documented contract ceiling (obligated plus EWACC position) placing it in the lower tier of the portfolio by contract value ⁵. Within the defense tech cohort tracked by this investigation, Shield AI's $65 million in obligated contracts compares to Anduril's $1.4 billion DoD and $862 million DHS, Palantir's $2.3 billion DoD, and SpaceX's $7.2 billion DoD ¹¹. Legacy defense primes hold 99.3% of total DoD contract value; all new-entrant defense tech companies combined — including Shield AI — hold less than 1% ¹¹.

The pattern of Coatue and a16z co-investing in the same defense technology companies (Shield AI, and through separate vehicles Anduril) while their associated personnel rotate into government positions overseeing those programs illustrates a structural pattern that recurs across the defense technology investment network. Coatue co-led both the Anthropic $10 billion round (January 2026) and the OpenAI $110 billion round (early 2026) while its former six-year advisor Emil Michael simultaneously served as Pentagon CTO ^{25 13}. The same structural pattern — private defense holdings outside 13F disclosure requirements, paired with personnel in acquisition authority roles — applies to Shield AI's position within the Coatue and a16z portfolios ²⁶.