CHAOS Industries

CHAOS Industries was put together in 2022 by John Tenet, Bo Marr, Gavin Hood and Brett Cummings, a founding group drawn from Epirus, Raytheon, Palantir and the British Secret Intelligence Service. Los Angeles is home, with offices in Washington, San Francisco, San Diego, London and Amman. The pitch is a rethink of how radar gets built. Instead of one expensive aperture with a single transmitter and receiver, CHAOS spreads the work across many cheap nodes that cooperate, an approach it sells as Coherent Distributed Networks. Money arrived quickly. A $145 million Series B led by Accel closed in late 2024, a $275 million Series C led by New Enterprise Associates and Accel followed in 2025, and a $510 million round led by Valor Equity Partners in November 2025 valued the company at $4.5 billion and took total capital raised past a billion dollars in three years.

Everything rests on timing. Multi-static radar works only if widely separated transmitters and receivers agree on the clock to within billionths of a second, which usually means cables or a GPS signal. CHAOS bought Ziva Corporation to do it wirelessly, folding in a two way time transfer technique that keeps every node in the network synchronised over the air. The company claims the arrangement buys operators up to ten minutes of extra warning against drones and missiles compared with conventional high end radars, at coverage costs it puts near a hundred dollars per square kilometre and surveillance ranges reaching 250 kilometres.

HYDRA is the hardware answer. Rugged nodes roughly the size of a shoebox, mounted on vehicles, vessels or aircraft, run software defined applications through an open interface, so the same box handles detection, communications or electronic effects depending on what is loaded onto it. Vanquish is the counter drone application, a low size, weight and power distributed early warning radar for short to mid range detection and tracking of unmanned aircraft, missiles and crewed aircraft. Astria reaches further out, a long range sensor built for persistent air and missile defense surveillance. A self forming, stay behind network of these is what CHAOS puts in front of customers in place of one high value emitter that an adversary can find and destroy. Manufacturing of the nodes is kept in house while the software stack is written alongside it.

Government traction has come faster than most three year old firms manage. The Air Force put $1.9 million of AFWERX Tactical Funding Increase money behind adapting Astria into a multi object tracking instrumentation radar for test and training ranges at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. A Small Business Innovation Research Phase II award funds further multi-static radar development. Vanquish went through the Project Flytrap 4.5 evaluation in Germany, and in December 2025 the Army added the company to its Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate marketplace, a buying route for US and NATO units that skips a fresh competition each time, with further Army experimentation, integration support and operator training running through 2026. Critical infrastructure is the second market, with airports, borders and energy sites named as the civil side of the same architecture. Will Hurd, the former Texas congressman, serves as chief strategy officer.