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The Pentagon, which started making capital commitments to U.S. venture capital funds around three years ago, has begun making new allocations to funds that invest in \u201ccritical\u201d technologies it deems important to national security.<\/p>\n
The Department of Defense, via the Office of Strategic Capital and the Small Business Administration, committed $150 million to Mare Liberum, a maritime technology-focused venture fund founded three years ago, for its second investment fund, Fortune<\/em> has learned. The capital was committed in Sep. 2025.<\/p>\n The Pentagon announced its first 13 commitments in late 2024, and a few months later, shortly before President Trump\u2019s Inauguration, published a list of 17 funds that had been added to the program in early 2025, including America\u2019s Frontier Fund, which is backed by Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel. The Department of Defense has since gone quiet on the program, however, not announcing any further commitments. The Department of Defense appears to have made five other VC fund commitments since 2025, though Fortune<\/em> was not able to learn the details of the investments.<\/p>\n \u201cThe process was extremely onerous,\u201d says Erik Bethel, a general partner at Mare Liberum, who says the vetting process took about 10 months, and that Mare Liberum underwent reference checks, rigorous due diligence, and spent more than \u201csix figures of legal\u201d bills to become one of 23 firms to be selected by the Office of Strategic Capital. More than 386 firms have applied for the program since it launched, according to a memo the firm put together that was shared with Fortune<\/em>. The Office of Strategic Capital did not respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2019s request for comment about the loan.<\/p>\n The deal is structured as an up to $150 million loan, where interest accrues but isn\u2019t paid back for 10 years. The capital from the Pentagon is meant to serve as an anchor investment, but is contingent on the fund raising another $120 million from private limited partners. In the Pentagon\u2019s first cohort of loans, capital went to firms that invested in biotechnology, quantum science, space tech, and renewable energy generation and storage, among other sectors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mare Liberum is focused particularly on maritime technology, where its partners say global supply chains are evolving and unmanned systems are changing the landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOver the last 20 years, we\u2019ve seen this incredible convergence of compute, now artificial intelligence,\u201d says Rear Admiral Lorin Selby, who had served as Chief of Naval Research for the Navy\u00a0before retiring and joining the fund, and said that he saw a dire need to apply these new compute and AI technologies to the defense sector.<\/p>\n The fund has backed five companies thus far, including Regent Craft, a seaglider startup, and Epirus, a counter-drone company.<\/p>\n Under the Trump Administration, the Department of Defense has become much more vocal about the importance of investments in defense technology. It has also sometimes become combative with some of the companies it has contracted with. Last week, President Trump announced via Truth Social that federal agencies must stop working with the LLM company Anthropic, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth later tweeted that he was directing the Pentagon to designate Anthropic a \u201csupply-chain risk.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked about the potential fallout of this on the sector, Rear Admiral Selby said he hopes the tech industry won\u2019t revert back to old tendencies and stop working with the Department of Defense, as Google famously did back in 2019. \u201cI hope cooler heads can prevail, that we can get the politically-charged nature out of the discussion, and talk about what is best for this nation, and how do we adopt the technologies to allow us to succeed in this race against China. That\u2019s what I think it\u2019s going to come down to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Pentagon #commits #150M #maritime #tech #fund #appears #ramping #venture #deals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Pentagon, which started ma… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[15139,20,8847,1466,13177,137,15140,10304,15141,953,2127,1571],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}