Lockheed Martin Ventures is investing in Silicon Valley-based Ayar Labs

Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount into Silicon Valley’s Ayar Labs.

Lockheed Martin Ventures is the investment arm of the defense tech giant Lockheed Martin. Ayar Labs is a five-year-old developer of broadband conductors. The company’s patented solution uses cost-effective, silicon processing techniques to develop the conductors, which are to develop high speed but use less power.

Ayar Labs said it will use this strategic investment to accelerate commercialization of its tech solution.

Lockheed Martin Ventures was created to strategically invest in small companies that are developing tech that could help advance the businesses that it works with. Since its inception in 2016, the organization has invested in 23 startups working in sectors like cybersecurity, data analytics, space tech, robotics and energy.

“Our investment strategy is to find commercially driven, dual-use technologies that align with Lockheed Martin current and future strategic interests like autonomy, artificial intelligence/machine learning, high performance computing, space technologies, among others,” Chris Moran, executive director and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, told Technical.ly.

Moran shared that locally, the venture firm has invested in Herndon, Virginia-based DeepSig, creator of deep learning software for wireless communications, and a College Park, Maryland-based startup that prefers to be unnamed at this point. This latest investment in Ayar Labs is part of a group of investments Lockheed Martin Ventures will announce this week.

“The Ayar Labs technology can potentially remove data management bottlenecks in systems that are collecting and fusing vast amounts of data,” said Moran. “It’s hoped that the technology will find its way into many of our systems, some of which find their design origins and production within the region.”

Since its founding, Ayar Labs has also received strategic investments from California-based semiconductor foundry GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Intel Capital, the Intel Corporation’s venture capital arm. The company demonstrated its tech solution at the Supercomputing Conference last year. Ayar Labs is currently working with semiconductor manufacturers and end users to help test and design its tech, with the goal to launch partnerships with some this year.

“Working with key system integrators like Lockheed Martin, who really understand the value of our solution and how to design it into future complex systems, is incredibly important,” said Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard in a statement. “In that sense, we view this relationship as more than funding alone, but as an important long-term working relationship as well.”