CHAOS Industries

CHAOS Industries is a young defence-technology company — founded in 2022 and based in Los Angeles — betting that the future of air defence lies in many cheap, networked sensors rather than a few expensive ones. Its core technology, which the company calls Coherent Distributed Networks, ties large numbers of sensing nodes together using high-precision time synchronization, spreading detection across land, sea and air instead of relying on a single large radar.

The company’s flagship product is Vanquish, a multistatic distributed early-warning radar aimed at the counter-drone problem as much as at missiles and aircraft. Where conventional radars are tuned for large, fast targets, CHAOS pitches Vanquish as able to pick out small drones — the cheap quadcopters and one-way attack aircraft that have reshaped recent conflicts — at long range. A late-2025 acquisition of the wireless time-synchronization firm Ziva Corporation is, the company says, meant to shorten the time between detection and response. CHAOS has begun building a customer footprint, including a US Air Force contract and addition to a US Army acquisition marketplace after taking part in a counter-UAS evaluation in Europe.

The firm has raised money quickly. A $275 million Series C in May 2025, led by New Enterprise Associates and co-led by Accel, valued it at around $2 billion; barely six months later a $510 million round led by Valor Equity Partners pushed the valuation to $4.5 billion and total funding past $1 billion. Its bench leans on the national-security establishment: chief executive John Tenet co-founded the company, and the former CIA director George Tenet — his father — serves as executive chairman, with the former congressman and CIA officer Will Hurd as chief strategy officer.