With $3.5 million in VC in the bank, he opened a warhead plant in Bastrop, east of Austin, this fall, but the dream is to expand to making mass quantities of explosives in-house. Right now the country relies on one factory in Tennessee as its primary source for RDX, the core ingredient in C-4, and Plantamura thinks his company can break into that market. To start, though, it’s making bespoke batches of explosives in-house, and has shipped warheads (without explosives—hard to transport) over to Ukraine.
The key to the Austin ecosystem, in his telling, was a surprising degree of fellow-feeling among the scene. Call it Texas hospitality: It’s about “offering up way more than you need to, and going out of your way to help,” Plantamura said, “and that being a massive distraction from what you’re doing, but you know it’s the right thing.” A rising tide lifts all guided-missile destroyers.
Before everyone in tech got into weapons, there were, broadly speaking, two types of investors who would put money into a defense start-up: vets who struck it rich, and people with connections to Palantir. Austin has both.
A charmingly converted bungalow on South Congress Avenue is the headquarters of 8VC, the fund started by Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of Palantir and the antiwoke University of Austin, and, through his political donations and think tank, the Cicero Institute, backer of many conservative causes. (Recently, on X, he posted a statement in support of the US military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats, adding in another post that he would also support public hangings of repeat violent criminals.) He announced he was moving his firm to Austin from San Francisco in late 2020, after making the move himself earlier that year.
Lonsdale, who is both an ardent proponent of the First Amendment (“I think there’s nothing wrong with killing a person who suppresses free speech,” he said in an interview last year) and a vocal critic of some stalwarts of the US press (on X in July, he called Reuters, the Associated Press, and The New York Times “disgusting, lying orgs”), responded very politely when I asked to speak with him for this story, but suggested I speak with his colleague Alex Moore instead. Moore heads up defense investment for 8VC, has known Lonsdale since their Stanford undergrad days, and just barely missed being a Palantir cofounder himself. (He was employee number one, though, and currently sits on its board.)