Ares Industries recently tested a prototype missile, pictured, in the Mojave Desert.
Y Combinator, the startup incubator, has long been synonymous with Silicon Valley software companies that have digitized society: Airbnb for vacations, Reddit for sharing news and information, Stripe for payments. Earlier this year it put a call out for a new sector: defense tech.
This month the storied firm announced its first investment in a weapons company called Ares that is aiming to develop warship-sinking missiles smaller and cheaper than the ones produced by incumbent defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. “This is an amazing market for startups,” YC partner Jared Friedman told Forbes. “It's proven, and the competitors are dinosaurs.”
Despite a long history with the military, doing business with the Pentagon and building defense companies has often sparked controversy in Silicon Valley. In 2018, Google declined to renew its involvement in a military contract called Project Maven when employees objected. Several universities cut ties with Palantir in 2019 after students protested the defense contractor’s ties to the federal border control agency, ICE. And this year, hundreds of engineers at Google’s AI division, DeepMind, called........