Why we backed NODA AI at pre-seed

In December 2024, as we sat in a multi-partner meeting with Phil Duong (co-founder/CEO at NODA), he told us he would “run through walls” to make this vision a reality. At the time, he had no revenue, no institutional backing, and only an early prototype.

We’d go on to be NODA’s first VC backer. Today, NODA AI announced a $25M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Booz Allen Ventures, Draper Associates, Bloomberg Beta, and Alumni Ventures joining. We doubled down alongside Crosslink.

Here’s why we backed Phil and Dave at pre-seed, and why the thesis is playing out faster than anyone predicted.

The problem they understood better than anyone

The modern battlefield is full of autonomous systems that don’t talk to each other. Drones, USVs, UUVs, satellites, and unmanned ground vehicles sit inside their own vendor ecosystems, and commanders are left to coordinate mixed fleets by hand.

Today that means a few hundred autonomous assets in a single theater. Five years from now it’s tens of thousands. A decade out, hundreds of thousands to millions of unmanned systems operating across air, land, sea, subsea, and space simultaneously. No human commander, no strike cell, no battle staff can orchestrate that by hand. The force that wins is the one whose machines coordinate themselves.

NODA is building that coordination layer. A vendor-agnostic orchestration platform that sits on top of existing hardware and lets warfighters design, deploy, and adapt coordinated plays across an entire mixed fleet in near real time. As fleets scale from hundreds to millions, the orchestration layer is the constraint. NODA is building it now.

Founders, not metrics

Phil and Dave aren’t founders who stumbled into defense. Both served in the Marine Corps as Naval Aviators and Joint Terminal Attack Controller Instructors, the exact role that puts you at the seam of multi-domain coordination under fire. They left the service, went to C3.ai, where they helped build from zero to $100M, and won the largest contract in the company’s history, before leaving to found NODA.

When we met them, there was no traction story. There was a prototype, a team, and a level of problem clarity that’s rare at any stage and almost unheard of at pre-seed. They knew which acronyms mattered and which were noise. They knew which integrations were politically possible and which weren’t. They knew what a JTAC actually needs in the loop and what a Group 3 UAV actually does when its link drops.

What sealed it wasn’t the pitch. It was what we learned about the months before the pitch. Phil’s original funding source had walked away. Most founders pause at that point. Phil convinced his engineers to keep building (without pay), recruited top researchers out of MIT Lincoln Labs into the same deal, and put his own savings in to make payroll math work. By the time he sat across from us, through sheer force of will, the prototype for an incredibly complex problem was running.

That’s the founder-market fit we look for at Outlander. Operator depth, product conviction, and the kind of persistence that doesn’t flinch when the room is empty.

What they’ve accomplished

Since the pre-seed, NODA has built one of the largest integrated ecosystems of defense autonomous systems in the world. 30+ OEM integrations spanning subsurface to space. Partners include Huntington Ingalls and Viasat. They’ve been selected over incumbents to lead the orchestration layer on a multi-domain collaborative autonomy program for the Department of War, and they hold contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence. The platform is in the field. The pipeline keeps growing.

Where it goes from here

Defense is the proving ground. The architecture points further. The platform is vendor-agnostic by design and the reasoning engine is built to optimize across any heterogeneous fleet. Same problem shape shows up in autonomous vehicle fleets, industrial robotics, logistics, infrastructure inspection. Too many independent systems, not enough coordination.

Outlander founder/managing partner, Paige Craig, put it simply in the announcement: “NODA AI has been the fastest growing company in our portfolio and is onto something big.”

Congrats to the whole team at NODA AI: A $25M Series A is a meaningful step. Knowing this team, it’s one of many.