Turning Consensus: Defense Unicorns Raises $136M Series B

Today, Defense Unicorns announced a $136M Series B led by Bain Capital. The investment makes Defense Unicorns officially a unicorn and further validates the company mission of making software a strategic detergent for our nation.

Initial Investment

We first partnered with Rob Slaughter, Jeff McCoy, and the Defense Unicorns team back in 2024 when we led the Series A. From our earliest conversations, Rob Slaughter and Jeff McCoy had one core mission: to make software a strategic deterrent for our nation. During their time in the Air Force, they kept experiencing a major risk to national security: despite how advanced US commercial software is, the systems that we rely on to protect our country are often heavily outdated due to software deployment complexities.

Rob and Jeff first tried tackling this problem within the DoD through their efforts building Platform One, the DoD’s first ever managed DevSecOps platform. They then took their learnings from Platform One and started Defense Unicorns to truly enable continuous software delivery, at scale, across any DoD environment, whether connected or disconnected from the internet. We firmly believed no team was better fit to solve this problem than the Defense Unicorns team, so we were thrilled to partner and lead the Series A.

Company Progress

At the time of our investment with just three customers, Defense Unicorns was early and decidedly non-obvious. Fast forward to now, and their platform is quickly becoming the consensus choice for software delivery within the DoD. The numbers speak for themselves, as the company has seen a 300% increase in adoption YoY in military systems.

What’s To Come

To meet the most urgent modernization needs in defense, Defense Unicorns will continue advancing its core platform across three strategic products: 

• UDS - a secure, portable, air-gap-native runtime that simplifies deploying, updating, and sustaining mission software

• UDS Registry - the first registry built for the speed, resilience, and supply-chain security required in extreme military environments

• UDS Army - a new delivery model that enables commercial software vendors to bring secure, mission-ready capabilities to soldiers faster through pre-authorized cloud environments and integrated DevSecOps pipelines

Ansa x Defense Unicorns

We at Ansa are truly grateful to have joined the journey early and are excited to double down on the team, making Defense Unicorns one of the largest investments in our inaugural fund. It’s been a privilege to call ourselves a partner to the company. Big congratulations to the entire Defense Unicorns team. Onwards!