Brandon Tseng
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Brandon Tseng is an American entrepreneur, defense-technology executive, and former United States Navy SEAL who is a co-founder and the president of Shield AI, a defense AI company that builds autonomy software for military aircraft and drones. He started the company in 2015 with his brother Ryan Tseng and the engineer Andrew Reiter, and he has helped grow it into one of the most valuable privately held defense startups in the United States, valued at about $12.7 billion in 2026.[1][4][6] Tseng, who also carries the title of chief growth officer, is the company's most visible public advocate for the idea of an "AI pilot": self-driving software that can fly aircraft autonomously in places where satellite navigation and radio links are jammed. In 2025, Time named him to its TIME100 AI list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.[3]
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Role | Co-founder, president, and chief growth officer, Shield AI |
| Education | B.S. mechanical engineering, U.S. Naval Academy; MBA, Harvard Business School |
| Military service | U.S. Navy SEAL and Surface Warfare Officer (about seven years) |
| Known for | Co-founding Shield AI; the Hivemind AI pilot; the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft |
| Recognition | TIME100 AI (2025) |
Tseng earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the United States Naval Academy and later completed a Master of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.[1][3] He served roughly seven years in the U.S. Navy as both a SEAL and a Surface Warfare Officer, the latter aboard the dock landing ship USS Pearl Harbor (LSD-52). Over the course of his service he deployed to the Pacific theater, to the Arabian Gulf, and twice to Afghanistan.[1]
His combat experience became the direct inspiration for Shield AI. According to an account by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Tseng conceived the idea for an autonomous reconnaissance drone while deployed in Afghanistan, after his unit took casualties clearing a hostile building in Uruzgan province that no one had been able to scout beforehand. He concluded that a small robot able to map the inside of a building or a tunnel on its own, without a human operator and without a reliable communications link, could keep service members out of ambushes.[9] That premise, putting an autonomous machine into the most dangerous part of a mission, runs through the company he went on to build.
Tseng co-founded Shield AI in 2015 in San Diego, California, together with his brother Ryan Tseng and the engineer Andrew Reiter. The brothers brought complementary backgrounds: Brandon supplied the operational experience of a former SEAL, while Ryan had already founded and sold a technology company, the wireless-charging startup WiPower, to Qualcomm. The founders started with roughly $100,000 raised from friends and family.[6] The company's stated mission is to protect service members and civilians with artificially intelligent systems, and its central technical goal is to build what it calls the world's best AI pilot.[1]
Shield AI's first products were the Nova quadcopter and the Hivemind autonomy stack that flew it. In 2016 the company won its first U.S. Department of Defense contract through the Defense Innovation Unit, and by the winter of 2018 Nova was operating with U.S. special operations forces in the Middle East, an event Shield AI describes as the first deployment of an AI-piloted drone for defense purposes in U.S. military history.[6][8] The company grew through both internal development and acquisition. In 2021 it bought Heron Systems, whose AI agent had won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AlphaDogfight Trials in 2020 by defeating an experienced human F-16 pilot in five straight simulated dogfights, and Martin UAV, which brought the V-BAT aircraft into Shield AI's lineup.[6][8] In March 2026 the company announced the acquisition of Aechelon Technology, a tactical-simulation firm.[4]
Ryan Tseng served as chief executive from the founding until 2025. On March 12, 2025, Shield AI named Gary Steele, the former chief executive of Proofpoint and Splunk, as its new CEO; Ryan transitioned to co-founder and president, taking on a strategy role, while Brandon continued as co-founder and president.[5] By 2025 the company employed about 1,000 people.[6] In April 2025, China added Shield AI to its list of "unreliable entities," a designation Tseng said had little practical effect because the company was, in his words, "intentionally not reliant on China."[6]
Shield AI raised money in a series of increasingly large private rounds as investor appetite for defense technology surged.
| Date | Amount raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | about $210 million | about $1 billion |
| June 2022 | about $165 million | about $2.3 billion |
| October 2023 | about $200 million | about $2.7 billion |
| March 2025 (F-1) | $240 million | about $5.3 billion |
| March 2026 (Series G) | $1.5 billion plus $500 million in preferred equity | $12.7 billion |
The March 2025 strategic round, which the company labeled F-1, drew investment from L3Harris and Hanwha alongside existing backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, and was tied to the launch of a developer platform called Hivemind Enterprise.[7] The Series G announced on March 26, 2026, was led by Advent International and JPMorgan Chase's Security and Resiliency Initiative, both first-time investors, with an additional $500 million in non-dilutive preferred equity from Blackstone. It valued the company at $12.7 billion, more than double its prior mark, and Shield AI said it expected revenue to grow more than 80 percent in 2026 to at least $540 million. "We don't expect growth to slow down," Tseng said, citing rising military-modernization spending worldwide.[4]
Shield AI organizes its business around Hivemind, an autonomy and artificial-intelligence software stack that the company markets as an AI pilot. Hivemind uses techniques including reinforcement learning to let aircraft navigate, search, and maneuver without GPS and without a continuous communications link to a human operator. The company says Hivemind has flown a range of aircraft, including the X-62A VISTA (a specially modified F-16) under DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program, the MQ-20 Avenger, the MQM-178, the Kratos BQM-177A, and its own V-BAT.[6][8]
| Product | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hivemind | Autonomy software (AI pilot) | Self-driving stack for aircraft and drones; operates in GPS- and communications-denied environments |
| Nova / Nova 2 | Autonomous quadcopter | Maps buildings and tunnels for reconnaissance; first AI-piloted drone fielded by the U.S. military (2018) |
| V-BAT | Vertical-takeoff fixed-wing UAV | Acquired with Martin UAV; deployed in Ukraine; "V-BAT Teams" lets one operator command several aircraft |
| X-BAT | AI-piloted VTOL fighter aircraft | Unveiled October 2025; runway-independent; first flight expected by the end of 2026 |
| Hivemind Enterprise | Developer platform | Lets third parties build autonomy applications on Hivemind |
The V-BAT, a vertical-takeoff aircraft that needs no runway, has become Shield AI's signature hardware product and has seen combat use in Ukraine, where the company opened a Kyiv office in January 2025 and reported more than 170 operational sorties.[10] In October 2025, Shield AI unveiled the X-BAT, which it describes as the world's first AI-piloted vertical-takeoff-and-landing fighter aircraft, with a range of roughly 2,000 nautical miles and the ability to launch from ships or austere sites without a runway. Its first test flight is expected by the end of 2026.[3][4]
As president and chief growth officer, Tseng leads Shield AI's commercial growth, government relations, and external advocacy, while Ryan Tseng and chief executive Gary Steele handle long-term strategy and overall operations. Brandon Tseng is a frequent public spokesman for the company and for the broader defense-technology sector, appearing on podcasts and in interviews to argue that affordable, mass-producible autonomous aircraft are essential to deterrence.
He has also become an advocate for changing how the Pentagon buys technology. In September 2024 he testified before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on fielding technology and innovation, and he has publicly pressed for what he calls problem-based acquisition: defining the operational problems the military needs solved and paying for working solutions, rather than writing prescriptive technical requirements that favor incumbent contractors.[2] His arguments place him alongside other defense-technology founders, such as Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens of Anduril Industries, who contend that software-first startups can supply the U.S. and its allies with autonomous systems faster and more cheaply than the traditional defense primes.
Tseng's recognition includes his 2025 selection for the TIME100 AI list, where he was cited for helping build a multibillion-dollar company focused on autonomous systems and an "AI pilot" for national security.[3]