Foreword

The intention of this report is to shine a light on the amazing veteran founders, companies, and investors who have played an integral part in building this ecosystem. Perhaps more importantly, this list is not a ranking but seeks to provide a snapshot of the continual growth of this dedicated group of people.

This report was completed by the Context Ventures Team. We are thankful for the summer associates, analysts, and team members who worked on this report with us! Ian O’Bryan, Ben Callon, Michael Schneider, Holden Lindblom, Brendan Aronson, Carina Cho, & Tim Hsia

Military Veteran Founders

If you are a military veteran founder and would like to meet with us or other military veteran VCs, then email us here or complete this form on the bottom of our homepage.

Additionally, the Veteran VC Coalition meets roughly quarterly.

▶️ If you are a founder and would like to meet with the Veteran VC Coalition, then sign up here.

The Military Veteran Startup (MVS) Ecosystem

If you’d like to learn even more about the Military Veteran Startup ecosystem, then:

1/ Join us at our annual Military Veteran Startup Conference (MVS). The MVS Conference is the premier event that brings together military veteran founders, VCs, institutional LPs, operators, and founders.

At MVS23, in February 2023, we convened hundreds of founders and several military veteran unicorn founders, where they talked about their experiences building companies. Our next conference will be held in downtown San Francisco at the Marines Memorial Club on 2/8/24-2/9/24 (Thursday and Friday).

There is no other event/forum that gathers our diverse community this way. A plethora of dealmaking happened at this event between founders and VCs, strategic partnerships, VCs with institutional limited partners, and employee hiring. Here's a highlight video from MVS23 and a highlight video from MVS22.

⚡ Register here to attend ⚡

2/ Want to stay in the loop regarding future events and the military veteran startup ecosystem?

▶️ Subscribe to our email newsletter and join over 2,000 subscribers with an email open rate of over 75%.

🔥 Join the Military Veteran Startup Slack Community here and join 525+ people

🚨 This year we hosted or cohosted with The Military Veteran and other companies roughly one event a month. Join us at our events.

3/ 📘 Hot off the press, our new book: The Military Veteran Entrepreneur. This book provides even more context and history on successful military veteran founders. Here are some of the military veteran founders we profile:

• Fred Smith - Fedex

• Bob Parsons - GoDaddy

• Ross Perot - Electronic Data Systems

• Phil Knight - Nike

• Charles Feeney - Duty Free Shopping and General Atlantic

• Charlie Munger - Berkshire Hathaway

• Stephen Schwarzman - Blackstone

• And many more!

▶️ Order the Military Veteran Entrepreneur book here

This report was completed by the Context Ventures Team. We are thankful for the summer associates, analysts, and team members who worked on this report with us! Ian O’Bryan, Ben Callon, Michael Schneider, Holden Lindblom, Brendan Aronson, Carina Cho, & Tim Hsia

Context & Methodology

At Context Ventures we support and invest in military veteran founders. Since our founding in early 2021 we have met with thousands of military veteran founders and as of October 2023 we have invested in 14 companies started by military veteran founders. We believe military veteran founders have the ingenuity, leadership, and persistence to build companies of consequence. In previous years we have done analysis on the military veteran startup ecosystem from founders to venture capitalists. This report focuses on 150 military veteran startups that have either achieved scale or are growing rapidly.

In putting together this list the team at Context Ventures assembled a comprehensive list of the top military veteran founded companies we are tracking as of October 2023. These veteran founders continue to make an impact in and out of uniform. In aggregate, these companies have raised over $6.9B from some of the most well known venture capitalist firms. Later stage companies who have received multiple rounds of funding have received the lionshare of this $6.9B. For example, 15 companies, who each have raised over $100 million, represent $4.68B of the total amount raised on our MVS list. 

As a caveat, we only focused on startups founded or cofounded by military veterans, military veteran spouses or intelligence community veterans. There are a number of startups that have military veteran leadership but we excluded them from this list if the founding team did not have military veteran roots. Additionally, we did not include any companies that are publicly traded and focused our research primarily on companies that were privately held.

The only other major list of top military veteran companies that we are tracking is the Vet100 list. This list is a good list. It is completely based on the Inc 5000 list. If a company is not listed on the Inc 5000 list then it is not even considered to be a top 100 company. Altogether we estimate this project took about 75 hours to compile given the selection, data, and analysis.

Disclaimer: We will be treating our list as a living document and we don’t profess to know every single military veteran founded company, but our overall goal is to! If you know of veteran founders making an impact or if there are other veteran founded companies that we should be tracking, then please let us know through this form that takes no more than 1 minute to complete. Additionally, if we’ve missed MVS companies of consequence, then please know that we’ll knock out 25 pushups for every omission🙏💪!

Unicorn Veteran Founded Companies

The MVS150 list spans industries, and so do the unicorns represented: Anduril, Carta, Dutchie, Hawkeye360, ID.me, Olive, ShieldAI, Sondermind, and Unite US. We hope to provide additional data on these companies. Not all companies are created equal, and neither are the industries they operate in. Time and capital raised provide insights into the journey of these founders and companies. Like all things startup, this list is dynamic. Please note that as of 10/31/23 we learned that Olive is shutting down.