Harpoon Ventures isn’t for “nerds.”
This is one of the many selling points investor Clint Brown gives for the San Diego–based defense-tech venture capital firm, which recently closed a $155 million fundraising round. Another selling point? Half of the fund’s 10 employees are former Navy SEALs, including founder and former Olympic swimmer Larsen Jensen.
“There’s Andrew Couillard,” Brown says, listing another investor. “He was EOD.”
When I ask what that means, Brown hesitates.
“He knows how to defuse nukes,” he finally says, laughing. “My head is like, You’re not supposed to tell people that.” Then, as if to make the résumé even more improbable: “He’s fluent in Mandarin, and he’s just the whitest guy you’ve ever met.”
Another partner, Jake Windle, served with the famed SEAL Task Unit Bruiser during the Iraq War’s Battle of Ramadi in 2006, alongside commander Jocko Willink and sniper Chris Kyle, whose memoir later became the film American Sniper.
Today, Brown insists, their lives are considerably less cinematic, filled with surfing, working out, and time spent with their kids. “We don’t do the ridiculous Silicon Valley lifestyle,” he says, “We’re going to be cool and crush it.”
For Harpoon, “crushing it” means being the MAGA VC firm—focusing exclusively on companies “building for America.”
“Another way to say that is America first,” says Brown. “Even though it’s not really a political thing, it’s just, are you focused on America or not?”
“It creates this cool kids’ club where you’re only in if you’re building for America,” Brown says. Unlike consumer software, he argues, defense investing is inseparable from Washington.
As a result of this mantra, Harpoon’s investment portfolio includes companies that are building autonomous submarines, “drones in a box,” satellite maneuvering systems, postquantum cryptography, and technologies for locating critical minerals using seismic data instead of drilling. Brown says the firm also explored investing in an Israeli start-up developing underground munitions capable of tunneling beneath targets before detonating, but that deal ultimately fell through.
“We find ourselves today with, luckily, really, really amazing technology being deployed to the war fighter in a faster and better way than we would’ve been stuck with had we just let the big primes continue with their modus operandi,” Windle tells me.
Even off the battlefield, Brown argues that some of these new technologies—such as a drone defense system that he says is currently in the works—could change American lives. “I don’t go to concerts or any outdoor events because we are absolutely not prepared for the drone threat,” Brown tells me. “I specifically didn’t go to [the U.F.C. fight at the White House] even though I was invited because I don’t do outdoor events.”