Shield AI

Shield AI is a defense technology company building artificial intelligence pilots for aircraft, headquartered in San Diego, California. Founded in 2015 by former U.S.

Navy SEAL Brandon Tseng, his brother Ryan Tseng, and Andrew Reiter, the company's mission is to deploy AI pilots that can fly aircraft and operate in teams without GPS, without communications, and without a human in the cockpit. Its flagship technology is Hivemind, an autonomy stack that reads sensor data and flies the aircraft itself; Hivemind has flown the F-16 (in the Air Force's VENOM program), quadcopters in combat, and Shield AI's own aircraft.

The company's best-known hardware is V-BAT, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing unmanned aircraft that needs no runway and is used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance by the U.S. and allied forces.

Shield AI sells Hivemind Enterprise as a developer platform for building autonomy onto third-party drones and aircraft, and in 2025 unveiled X-BAT, a jet-powered VTOL collaborative combat aircraft. In March 2026 the company announced a $1.5 billion Series G at a $12.7 billion post-money valuation — led by Advent International and co-led by the Strategic Investment Group of JPMorganChase's Security and Resiliency Initiative — alongside $500 million of preferred equity from funds managed by Blackstone and a $250 million delayed-draw facility, more than doubling the $5.3 billion valuation it carried a year earlier.

As part of the raise Shield AI acquired the visual-simulation company Aechelon to accelerate its Hivemind Foundation Model for Defense, which is trained in simulation and refined through real-world operations. The company projected more than $540 million in revenue for 2026.