In November 2023, in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, we published a piece called Patriotism as a Service. In it, we called on Israeli founders to build software-first defense companies. We described our conviction that the world was changing – that modern conflict no longer plays out solely on the battlefield, but across multiple fronts, including the digital world we’re all so deeply entrenched in.
We also mentioned, almost in passing, that we’d made our first investment in this category: a company called Airis Labs. We wrote: “more on this soon.”
This is that “more.”
The Battlefield in Our Pockets
There’s something that’s been true for a while now, but has become impossible to ignore: every major kinetic conflict in the world today is simultaneously a media event.
On October 7th, Hamas operatives live-streamed their own atrocities on the very devices they stole from their victims. In Ukraine, drone footage of frontline engagements circulates on Telegram within minutes of capture. Across every theater of conflict, from Gaza to Sudan to the South China Sea, the proliferation of edge devices means that virtually everything is being recorded, uploaded, and broadcast in real time.
We carry in our pockets the most powerful surveillance devices ever built. There are now billions of them. And every single one is a potential intelligence source.
The volume of user-generated content (UGC) being produced in conflict zones, at border crossings, at protests, at crime scenes, is staggering. A single day of footage related to a single incident can dwarf the entire analytical capacity of an intelligence agency.
Governments Weren’t Built for This
The intelligence community has remarkable tools. SIGINT, HUMINT, VISINT, ISR, satellite imagery, and cyber capabilities are battle-tested disciplines that agencies have refined over decades. But they were designed for a fundamentally different information environment.
OSINT (open-source intelligence) has emerged as a discipline precisely to fill this gap. And it’s valuable.
But OSINT, as it’s traditionally practiced, was built for text: scanning articles, social posts, forums. It was not built for the visual, multi-modal flood of video content that defines the modern information environment.
The core problem isn’t access to information. It’s the opposite. There is simply too much of it, arriving too fast, in too many places, for human analysts to process.
Think about what it takes to extract intelligence from a single video clip:
- Geolocation (often without metadata)
- Object identification
- Facial recognition
- Behavioral pattern analysis
- Cross-referencing with other clips from the same incident
- Linking a previously unknown actor to a known network
What once took a team of analysts days needs to happen in minutes in order for the data to remain relevant.
There aren’t enough analysts in the world to do this manually. And even if there were, the pace of modern conflict doesn’t wait for them.
Enter Airis
Airis Labs was founded on a deceptively simple insight: every piece of media, regardless of its source, is a potential intelligence asset. The question is whether you have the capability to unlock it.
The company has built an AI platform that transforms large swaths of everyday digital media into mission-ready intelligence for government operators.
Airis’ AI understands video, audio, images, and text as a single coherent stream. It then fuses perspectives across sources and time, identifying relationships and patterns that remain invisible to traditional tools. It builds living intelligence objects that update automatically as new data arrives.
The result is what Airis calls Super Perspective™: the ability to synthesize overlapping viewpoints into a comprehensive grip on reality that no single analyst, and no single camera, could ever provide alone.
This isn’t an incremental improvement on existing tools. It’s a new category: User-Generated Field Intelligence.
On the Team
We’ve said it before in other contexts: we back founders, not just companies.
We met Noam Friedman, Rotem Abeles and Amos Lahav before the defense tech hype train left the station. They weren’t (and aren’t) driven by increased attention that the sector is receiving. Rather, their passion and motivation come from lived experiences during their time within Israeli Special Operations and Palantir.
From day one, their sense of urgency and technical vision has propelled the company forward in ways that have surpassed even our expectations. It’s also worth mentioning that their work with government agencies over the past several years has been nothing short of inspiring.
Working with them over the past two years has been one of the genuine pleasures of this investment.
The Bigger Picture
We often talk about how great companies get built: at the intersection of a massive, underserved problem and a team that is uniquely equipped to solve it. Airis is exactly that.
The digitization of conflict is not a trend that will reverse. If anything, it will accelerate. The proliferation of edge devices, the ubiquity of broadband, and the normalization of video as the primary medium of human communication, all point in one direction. The intelligence community will either build the capabilities to harness this information environment, or adversaries will exploit the gap.
Airis Labs is building those capabilities. And we are incredibly proud to be their partners as they do.