Vannevar Labs

Vannevar Labs is a defence-intelligence software company founded in 2019 out of Stanford by Brett Granberg, a former investor at the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel, and Nini Hamrick, a former US intelligence officer. The company sits on the “non-kinetic” side of defence technology — it does not build drones or weapons, but the software that intelligence officers use to find, translate and make sense of information.

Its flagship product, Decrypt, is a foreign-text platform: it continuously pulls in hard-to-reach open sources — foreign publications, news sites, social media and blogs in many languages — translates them, and lets analysts search the material and spot patterns at scale. The company has also developed tools for maritime domain awareness and for detecting foreign disinformation, applying natural-language processing and, more recently, generative AI to the intelligence workflow.

By the time of its $75 million Series B in January 2023, led by Felicis Ventures, Vannevar said Decrypt was deployed across fifteen government agencies and had generated some $25 million in sales. In November 2024 the Defense Innovation Unit moved the company’s prime contract under its Real-Time Information and Effects program from prototype to production, an award with a $99 million ceiling intended to scale the software across the Department of Defense. Its customers sit largely in the part of the defence enterprise most concerned with watching and contesting information rather than striking targets.

The deployment drew wider attention in 2025 when MIT Technology Review profiled how the US military was using Vannevar’s generative-AI tools for intelligence work — a rare public window onto software that usually operates well out of view. The company’s founders both came from inside the intelligence community, and its positioning reflects that: it competes less on hardware than on the unglamorous problem of turning an ocean of foreign-language, open-source material into something an analyst can actually act on.