the headline was changed:
Even mid-sprint to a secret flight, The Navy’s US Navy just told us what’s on its tech chief has a pitch wish list for investorsthe next several years
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Justin Fanelli, the Department of Navy’s chief technology officer, has spent the last three and a half years trying to make the U.S. Navy easier to do business with.
Fanelli reached out because the “demand signal” he sent to investors last year had only grown, and it was making an impact, he said.
How much money the Navy puts to work each year depends on what counts as spending, Fanelli said.
The stage of company the Navy buys from has shifted, too.
4 sentences from our version of the report,
chosen to cover it. Nothing here is written; every line is in the article below.
How
Summarized version
They were like, ‘We’ll figure [the logistics], we’ll tell you as you get there.’. Fanelli said the Navy is trying to shift toward what he calls co-investment — putting money behind companies alongside private capital rather than writing a check to an established prime contractor.
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The article, shortened and in plain language
Justin Fanelli, the Department of Navy’s chief technology officer, has spent the last three and a half years trying to make the U.S. Navy easier to do business with.
“You have an hour and 15 minutes to get on a plane,” Fanelli said, recounting what he’d just been told, speaking into his phone as he walked, the sun shining behind him. “I will figure that out in the next 20 minutes,” he said, sounding excited about the adventure ahead.
Fanelli reached out because the “demand signal” he sent to investors last year had only grown, and it was making an impact, he said. When the Navy first published its longer-term technology priorities, investors told him it changed how they thought about the Navy’s buying plans, which is part of why he’s doing it again — sharing a fresh list of what the Navy wants to buy in the next several years, this time vetted by a handful of venture investors before release.
How much money the Navy puts to work each year depends on what counts as spending, Fanelli said. “We spend in the like $150 billion range every year,” he said, though he was careful to separate that number — total Navy buying — from something narrower, like direct equity investment.
More often, co-investment means the Navy waits for companies to mature a product on their own before buying it, rather than funding early research itself.
The stage of company the Navy buys from has shifted, too. “We mostly buy Series D through F type companies,” Fanelli said, adding that the Navy used to fund its own early-stage research to cover the seed-through-Series-B gap.
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