With a full slate of over 25 events and 3000 registered attendees, Deep Tech Week Washington is debuting this week in the National Innovation Quarter.
Thursday night’s headline event is the official Deep Tech Startup Crawl, co-hosted by Squadra Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank and Technical.ly at the JBG Smith Experience Center.
Over 100 startups applied to participate in the event. The 40 that made the cut represent the breadth of deep tech–connected startups operating in the DC area, and the volume of related companies that come through the National Capital Region every week.
In addition to companies headquartered in Virginia, Maryland and DC, the crawl lineup includes startups from California, Oregon, New York and Tennessee. Visiting founders are making the most of the trip, from scheduling engagements on the Hill to attending events like the Army Demand Signal Forum, Billington Cybersecurity Summit and other Deep Tech Week Washington happenings.
The concentration of startups solving critical national security challenges truly differentiates DC from every other tech ecosystem. Born out of military installations, national labs, defense primes, government service and tech industry giants, this wave of founders maintains engagement with those communities and helps drive connectivity across them.
For the crawl, companies are organized into six categories: autonomy, applied AI, bio, energy, cyber and sci-fi.
Scroll for a preview.
Autonomy
Overwatch Imaging — Mission-ready sensor autonomy that delivers superhuman vision and workload reduction to time-critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.
Cachai — Collaborative autonomy software layer that turns hub-dependent systems into consensus-based distributed ones, a single source of truth with no single point of failure.
MegaDrone 360 — Multi-functional unmanned aerial vehicle designed for military, civilian, emergency response, and search and rescue operations.
Symphony Space — Modular, fully autonomous, reconfigurable space station that hosts multiple tenants simultaneously, in order to rapidly deploy, swap and upgrade technology.
DERECHO Defense — Autonomous platforms, rocket hardware, responder systems, subsea technologies, and mission software for demanding and disconnected operating environments.
AirVani — Infrastructure layer for persistent electric flight, enabling drones and aircraft to move from limited-duration platforms to always-available assets across security, logistics, and mobility.
Blue Horizon — Affordable, adaptable, autonomous VTOL systems that move from logistics to maritime and emergency response on one core platform.
Applied AI
Noah Labs — AI integrated development environment for regulated industries, with full codebase context, policy aware execution, and airgapped operation.
SysGit — Agile engineering platform for collaborative requirements management, system modeling, and systems engineering automation.
Statecraft — Software that turns documented public-sector workflows into governed AI workers that execute tasks, escalate exceptions, and leave an audit trail.
Navier — Agent-driven engineering platform for hardware teams that automate computational fluid dynamics simulation, meshing, FEA, and flight software workflows.
Mimir Systems — AI engine for advanced materials that discovers and qualifies advanced materials faster, cheaper, and more reliably than traditional R&D.
Poncho — AI-powered tools that guide service members toward better financial decisions and give leaders the visibility to strengthen unit readiness.
Mantis Analytics — AI platform that gives visibility of supply chains and simulates scenarios across partners, routes, and policies to ensure continuity.
Epsilon3 — Operations platform that helps teams manage quality, compliance, and mission-critical work with full visibility from release through execution and closeout.
Hanno Labs — Applied AI for expert judgement work, leveraging frontier AI models and systems that help organizations in highly regulated industries keep pace with a changing world.
Bio
Regenova — Monoclonal antibody therapeutics using AI-driven design and quantum-assisted molecular prediction, accelerating discovery from target identification to optimized candidates.
Wafoo — Citation-grounded, regulatory-aligned AI software for life-science and pharma teams, with hands-on training and integration, bilingual in Arabic & English.
Salynt — Unifies clinical imaging, hospital operations, and environmental risk into one AI-powered platform so care teams act on clarity, not chaos.
Cyber
Barding Defense — Offensive security platform that captures, structures, and learns, delivering cross-operation intelligence that makes every operator and every defender smarter.
SnowCrash Labs — Adaptive offensive security, alignment and quality control for AI that finds dangerous behaviors in AI models before they reach production.
Hardshell — Makes sensitive data safe to use with AI by measuring AI knowledge base leaks, catching extraction live, and hardening data upstream.
Terrakinesis — Software microservice for message delivery across crewed, uncrewed, sensor, and dismount nodes in denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited bandwidth environments.
Sitehop — Devices that sit between network endpoints, encrypting and decrypting data in dedicated hardware, delivering ultra-low latency, quantum-ready encryption for data in motion.
Cipher — Cryptographic security control layer, providing visibility and enabling confident, low-disruption migration to post-quantum cryptography.
Karambit.AI — Automated static analysis to detect and verify the integrity of software safety, cybersecurity, and functionality behaviors prior to deployment without source code.
Shift5 — Operational intelligence platform that captures and analyzes data flowing through complex systems and fleets detecting cyber threats and predicting mechanical failures.
Gargoyle Systems — Low-altitude airspace security, including drone detection, monitoring, and alerts.
Energy
Forager Station — Electrochemical mineral recovery solutions and equipment, specializing in enabling companies that own lithium resources to produce battery-grade lithium from waste
Chariot Defense — Hardware and software infrastructure to solve how energy is transformed, controlled, and distributed as power.
Terra Fusion Energy Corporation — Developing centrifugal magnetic mirror fusion technology, a cost-effective and scientifically proven pathway to commercial fusion energy.
Scaled Atomics — Developer of the MN-350, a mobile nuclear microreactor designed to replace diesel generators at forward operating bases and contested environments.
Lunar Forge — Fission reactor infrastructure on the Moon, autonomous laser sintering fusing lunar regolith into the structural and thermal infrastructure that makes surface fission possible.
The Earthineering Company — Developing the world’s first nuclear reactor designed from the ground up for energy used the way most energy is used, through heat.
Sci-Fi
Aurelius Systems — Directed energy laser systems for counter-drone defense, fusing advanced optics, AI-guided tracking, and high-powered directed energy into a compact platform.
Brio Robotics — World models for robots, trains custom neural world models from a robot’s own data to close the sim-to-real gap, then trains policies that transfer to hardware.
Precixion — 3D magnesium printing building the P300, a laser powder bed fusion system producing magnesium and titanium parts the U.S. industrial base can not make domestically.
Cobot — Collaborative robots for a future where robots are a trusted extension of surroundings, where they work, adapt, and react around humans, instead of the other way around.
DRAGON — AR Eyewear for high-movement environments, analyzes data and context to deliver the right information, so wearers can move without distraction.
Quantum Catalyzer — Lab turning frontier quantum research into ventures with real-world impact partnering with industry, government, and research organizations.
Register for the Startup Crawl or visit DeepTechWeek.com to create your schedule for the whole week.
