Helping deep tech defense startups go hypersonic with Lavrock Ventures’ Alex Poulin

What was your journey into this space?

I took a somewhat traditional route to enter the world of venture capital. I studied economics in undergrad, which led me to start my career in consulting. Looking back, consulting was a great place to start out – it helped me build a strong foundation of hard skills in finance, strategy, tech, and it even involved some exposure to working with the federal government.

While consulting was a great place to solve problems and affect change, over time I realized the real momentum and impact was happening in the startup world. So I ultimately went back to business school to focus on entrepreneurship, venture capital, and policy. In traditional VC fashion, I got in front of the right people at the right time and landed myself a gig as the first hire at Lavrock, which my three partners had started just a few years prior in 2015. Since then, we’ve made over 30 investments across North America and Europe, and we’ve recently started making new investments out of our third fund.

Lavrock Ventures invests in both software and deep tech, across both commercial and national security markets. Why these focus areas?

In short, our belief is that there is tremendous value in each of these sectors, as well as at their intersection. 

We focus on both commercial and national security markets because they are increasingly converging. Technologies that start in the defense sector often find commercial applications, and vice versa. By investing at this intersection, we’re able to back founders that are not only solving hard, high-stakes problems, but also capable of scaling across markets to create both strategic and economic value.

Software enables speed, scalability, and rapid iteration, which is essential for solving today’s dynamic commercial and defense challenges. Meanwhile, deep tech – spanning fields like quantum, autonomy, and next-gen hardware – drives foundational shifts in capability and competitiveness.

We also think that Lavrock has a strong track record and competitive edge in these areas. We’re on the ground in DC and we’ve been doing this for years – we know investing here takes patience, nuance, and real connections.

Do you see any patterns in terms of what makes deep tech founders successful?

Successful deep tech founders need to speak two languages fluently: the technical language as well as the customer language. There is a reason that many technological breakthroughs get stuck in a lab or R&D land. We talk to plenty of founders who are technologically and academically brilliant, but if they can’t sell their vision or value prop to customers, or craft the story to investors, it’s going to be really hard to commercialize that. The most successful deep tech founders we see have that ability.

It doesn’t always have to be coming from one individual either. Oftentimes we’ll see strong founding teams that complement each other in this way. At the end of the day, the best tech doesn’t always win, so we look for founders with persistence and determination, paired with the technical chops to back it up.

How do you carry out diligence on deep tech founders?

Everyone has a slightly different approach to how they diligence deep tech companies. At the stage we typically evaluate these companies, we’re often looking at technology that is still in development and in many cases the company is still pre-revenue. We may only have a prototype or technical roadmap to review. This means that our diligence relies heavily on founder past performance, market research, and external references. We also have a mix of SMEs and advisors that can help us evaluate the feasibility of a certain technology or approach. 

Direct customer validation or revenue is obviously the best, but at the end of the day, we’re making a bet on the team. We spend a great deal of time getting to know them, their capabilities, motivations – understanding that this needs to be a partnership where both sides are in alignment. 

Do you draw a distinction between deep tech and national security?

Certainly not all deep tech is relevant to national security, but there is frequent overlap. One of the strongest examples of overlap is in the space sector. Space is inherently “deep tech”, and for the longest time, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community were the only customers for these companies, and in many ways still are.

We view national security as a market and means to support the growth and innovation of deep tech companies. In some cases, the national security market can be big enough to support the company in a serious way. In others, it can be a helpful way to prove out data points and utilize R&D dollars or grants before ultimately orienting towards the commercial world. Regardless, there’s a natural tie between the public and private sector in developing and incubating some of these deep tech companies because it does require additional resources, infrastructure, and time than other types of tech.

How are the recent big geopolitical shifts influencing those building in the national security tech ecosystem?

The national security tech ecosystem has changed dramatically in recent years, driven in a major way by geopolitical tensions with near peer rivals such as China and ongoing conflict in places like Ukraine. We’ve seen changes on the government side in terms of how they engage with the private sector, and obviously an influx in founders and new investors focused on solving these types of problems.

One of the bigger shifts I’ve seen recently is the change in attitude and ability of the government to adopt newer commercial technologies faster. We’re seeing more and more startups and “non-traditionals” gaining significant traction, and there is a heavy emphasis on moving faster and being cheaper than the alternatives. On the deep tech side of defense, this often translates to companies innovating to bring down the cost curve substantially, while also investing in infrastructure to support scalable mass.

One example of this in our portfolio is Castelion, a California-based company focused on developing low-cost and highly manufacturable hypersonic missiles. Hypersonics has been a top priority for the pentagon for years, and they’ve invested huge sums with little to show for it. Castelion is rethinking how hypersonics are built by vertically integrating subsystems so they can iterate faster and drive down costs in a way that the pentagon has never seen before. It’s a classic example of commercial-style innovation reshaping a defense priority.

We’re seeing this need for asymmetric advantages play out in all domains – space, maritime, manufacturing, autonomy. Innovation at an affordable price has become a major theme in global national security. 

What would make it easier for founders to enter the DOD ecosystem?

Even if there are positive signals that the ecosystem is changing, the DOD is still incredibly hard to navigate as a founder. Bureaucracy, budget delays, interagency politics can all be a death blow to a company on a shoestring budget. The SBIR process was established to solve this, but that process itself has its own challenges. There needs to be a clearer path from early R&D contracts to real procurement and long-term budgets. Founders often can’t see how to scale beyond experimentation.

Faster contracting and payment processes are also critical. Long sales cycles and delayed funding can break startups before they gain traction. Some of the newer government innovation initiatives (DIU, AFWERX, OSC to name a few) have been successful in helping companies navigate this landscape easier, but we need more of it and we need it to be faster. Avenues such as “Other Transaction Authorities” (OTAs) are one way for a founder to get plugged into a user group fast, with money to back it up. And if they can get access to those stakeholders early, especially end-users and program managers, it would help them validate needs and requirements as well.

Ultimately, founders need faster pathways, real customer access, and trusted investors and partners who can help them navigate the complexity.

Will dual-use technologies, applicable in both commercial and military settings, dominate the future, or will we still see bespoke military systems?

Dual-use technologies will likely still be dominant in this category, but there is absolutely a market for specialized military systems. Lavrock has historically invested in both. Commercial markets are still king to drive faster innovation cycles through more direct customer feedback and provide significant opportunity for scale. And modern warfare benefits greatly from the speed and adaptability offered by commercial tech, but there are clearly special cases where there needs to be bespoke systems.

Going forward, I think you’ll continue to see dual-use flourish, with commercial tech at the foundation, tailored solutions in the middle, and high-end bespoke systems at the top. The challenge will be about how well the military can integrate across the stack, and how easy it is for a commercial company to work with them.

It’s smart business to pursue both markets eventually – but it is critical to understand which one you’re prioritizing and when, it’s hard to do both simultaneously. It typically makes most sense for founders to try and focus on a single category out of the gates to avoid being stretched thin from a resource perspective. The requirements and technical roadmap can vary wildly, and the sales teams are two completely different skillsets, but if you have the expertise and resources to work with both, they can be incredibly complementary.

At Lavrock, we view our portfolio across a spectrum across commercial and national security. We have companies that are purely commercial, such as Apkudo, companies that are purely defense, such as Castelion, and companies that are true dual-use, such as Sayari. But most of our companies tend to fall somewhere in the middle of dual-use, with a slant towards commercial, at least in the long run.

How do you define deep tech?

Deep tech has become a catch-all for simplicity, but it essentially applies to companies focused on real scientific or engineering breakthroughs – things that aren’t easy to copy and that take real time, capital, and conviction to develop. It’s not just about novel products – it’s about tackling hard, fundamental problems where if it works, it would be game-changing. Deep tech is where many of the biggest shifts are happening, whether in AI, space, advanced materials, or autonomy. These are the kinds of breakthroughs that don’t just disrupt – they redefine entire categories.