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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}t the Head of the Charles Regatta in October, a Palantir table sat on the river bank between booths supporting charity causes and hawking sports drinks.

As rowers raced down the Charles, a company recruiter approached curious Harvard students and advertised joining the company — a sprawling data analytics firm with extensive military contracts, whose work includes developing artificial intelligence targeting systems for the Pentagon — as a way to “solve the world’s hardest problems.”

For the past year, Palantir has been heavily courting students at Harvard. In the fall, the Harvard Republican Club hosted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and Palantir was a sponsor for Harvard WECode’s annual conference for women in computer science.

And in a room at Harvard’s Northwest Labs on a Thursday afternoon this March, Eric Menser — who is the startup’s lead at Palantir — presented the company’s AI platform to more than 100 eager Harvard affiliates. Students in Harvard Ventures, an undergraduate club that organized the event, and other attendees got a preview of Palantir’s Startup Fellowship, slated for a public launch the next month.

Afterward, students stayed more than an hour to ask questions. “We had to kick everyone out because we could have stayed all night,” Menser wrote in an email. “It just went to show that the builders at Harvard are locked in right now.”

And in April, Harvard Business School hosted its fourth annual Technology and National Security conference, featuring executives from the old guard of defense contracting, like Booz Allen Hamilton, and the new: Anduril, Epirus, and Shield AI. Former secretary of defense Mark Esper and Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan delivered keynote speeches.

The conference drew more than 1,000 participants.

A small but growing stream of Harvard students are heading into the defense tech sector. Student-founded startups create tools to detect radio signals and GPS jamming, manufacture magnets from rare earth metals, and operate autonomous drones in swarms.

Many of them are drawing on reservoirs of institutional support at Harvard, from the Harvard Innovation Labs — a makerspace and incubator that sits next door to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences campus in Allston — to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a hub for foreign policy power brokers since the Cold War.

“Harvard has been amazing, the resources here are generally basically infinite, and the connections we make here are priceless,” said HKS student and U.S. Air Force veteran Artemiy V. Shlyaptsev, who co-founded a startup that builds virtual reality programs for military training with his brother Maxim. For founders, he said, there “is no better time than now.”

‘A Definite Rise’

At Harvard, students are flocking to jobs developing military technologies in record-high numbers, according to a group of venture capitalists who regularly fund Harvard-founded defense startups.

Patrick S. Chung ’96, Tuan Ho ’09, and Brandon C. Farwell all work for Xfund, which Chung co-founded in 2014. The firm — which has been closely advised by top SEAS administrators since its founding — made its name backing student-founded startups in fields from fintech to fertility.

Sitting at a cafe on the HBS campus before the Technology and National Security Conference in April, Chung, Ho, and Farwell said they’ve seen interest in defense tech spike.

“There’s a rise, there’s a definite rise,” said Chung, a former Crimson Editorial chair.

Farwell chimed in: “On both dimensions — of net new companies created, plus a keen interest in, ‘How do I get a job at Anduril?’”

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It’s not just at Harvard that defense tech has boomed. The number of seed funding rounds for defense companies between 2018 and 2023 surged more than 80 percent compared to the prior six years, according to a report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Two aerospace and defense contractors — Anduril and Shield AI — reached “unicorn” status in the last six years, hitting billion-dollar valuations.

“It is definitely an area of rabid interest now, and it’s because, in some way, the country feels we need it,” Chung said. “There’s a lot of, obviously, capital flowing into it.”

Under the Trump administration, the amalgamation of Silicon Valley and the defense world has intensified. Palantir, co-founded by longtime Trump enthusiast Peter Thiel and now led by Alex Karp, recently landed a $30 million contract with Immigration and Customs enforcement. Just last week, the Pentagon more than doubled the ceiling on its contract with Palantir to $1.3 billion through 2029. Its stock has soared since Trump’s election.

And SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos have deep ties with the Trump administration, which awarded more than $8 billion in U.S. Air Force contracts across the two companies in April.

Several Harvard students said that young entrepreneurs have been eager to take advantage of shifts in the Defense Department from relying on traditional military technology powerhouses, like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, toward high-tech startups.

“You’re seeing more the traditional Silicon Valley Big Tech types — the Elon Musks of the world — for better or for worse, getting directly involved in what’s happening in D.C.,” Ho said. “The collision course of those two worlds — Silicon Valley and D.C. — has definitely created more surface area, more opportunity and interest.”

“Before, those were divorced,” Farwell said. “Now, they’re almost literally married.”

But even before Musk and Trump, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine began accelerating campus interest in defense technology, according to the Xfund investors.

“Ukraine, obviously, was an alarm bell,” Farwell said. As the war grinds on, it’s been shaped by new technologies, used in new ways — drones, cyberwarfare, and electronic attacks that jam GPS signals and disrupt communications. Now, Farwell said, the government is looking to buy from companies whose products are “scrappier, faster, truly AI native.”

Both Artemiy and Maxim Shlyaptsev said the war made people see that America’s military advantage was not as insurmountable as they had thought.

“This era of defense tech is getting bigger, bigger, bigger, because the entire world is realizing, ‘Wow, we were not prepared,’” Artemiy Shlyaptsev said.

Their company won first place at a Xfund pitch competition judged by Sam Altman last year. The U.S. Air Force and Army have both placed orders to purchase its tools.

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At the pitch competition, Shlyaptsev said, Altman asked him why he was building into defense. “We’re building into defense because we see a need,” he recalled saying in response. “We need to ensure peace and deterrence and we see this technology saving lives, first and foremost.”

Caine A. Ardayfio ’25-26 took a year off from Harvard to work as a software engineer at the aerospace startup Mach Industries, where he worked on Viper cruise missiles. Ardayfio said he thought a lot of student-founded startups were “kind of boring,” but Mach piqued his interest when its founder, an MIT dropout, talked about building missiles in his workshop.

“When I met the other people who were working on the company with us, they were really passionate about helping America,” he said.

And many students going into defense tech say their work serves more than military goals. Many technologies that are part of daily life today — like touch screens, internet and GPS — were originally built or funded by the Defense Department. Now, many defense companies claim that their inventions are “dual-use.” Palantir advertises that it sells its software not only to counter-terrorism efforts, but also to hospitals and banks.

“There’s this negative association when it comes to your average layman or your average student thinking about defense. They think, ‘oh, military-industrial complex,’” said Johnny Ni ’27, who interned at Northrop Grumman for a summer. “But that is a very backwards perspective, because, even if you look beyond defense, most of the big technological milestones humanity has achieved through history has been through technology that’s been pushed out during war or during conflict.”

Ni founded a startup in 2024 that builds data-labeling infrastructure for defense contractors that sell autonomous systems.

Defense startups often describe their goals in apocalyptic terms. Mach Industries’ mission statement says “Mach must forge the unmanned future, or a totalitarian state will.” Its decentralized factories are designed to endure “when supply chains collapse” — and that’s a “when,” not an “if.”

But some students going into defense tech said another big draw for the field is, simply, because they think it’s cool.

“Personally, I’m just really fascinated with defense tech,” Ni said. “I think it’s badass, you know?”

‘A Center of Gravity’

As its students launch careers in testing missiles and extracting rare-earth minerals, Harvard has been there to help them lift off — linking students with funding and leveraging deep connections in the national security establishment.

“Cambridge is a center of gravity for a lot of very intelligent people and technologies. So they’re all very drawn to this location,” said Ryan B. Holte, a Harvard Law and Business School student who interned at Anduril and worked in acquisitions at the Air Force and Space Force. “That’s where the Belfer Center and the Kennedy School comes in.”

Holte is one of the organizers of the QLab, a new national security innovation accelerator housed under the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project. The incubator’s launch this winter reflected “a clear and growing demand among students to apply their talents in service of national and global security,” according to Intelligence Project director Mark Pascale.

More than 75 students filled out the interest form in its first year, and the QLab ultimately took 14 teams, with many of them already raising capital and selling to government contractors.

“We, frankly, had almost too many people show up to a lot of our meetings,” Holte said. The QLab keeps running out of food.

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The accelerator helps Harvard and MIT affiliates pursue government funding and partnerships, including forming connections with the Belfer Center’s National Security Fellows, senior military and intelligence officials who spend 10 months.

“It’s been probably one of our most useful assets as a younger company,” said Kushan S. Weerakoon ’25, who co-founded a startup that builds software for streamlining manufacturing processes, which has both military and civilian applications.

Though the QLab incubator has only recently debuted, they have had “an incredible amount of traction,” according to Holte.

“It’s been very, very successful, way more successful than we had imagined,” he added.

And the Business School has also seen spiking interest in defense and dual-use technology. At the HBS Technology and National Security Conference, hundreds of Harvard affiliates gathered to listen to the remarks of top U.S. defense officials. Last year, the conference invited Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf. This year, former national security advisor Jake Sullivan headlined.

Harvard’s institutional ties to the defense establishment go back to the 20th century, Cambridge was a hotbed for military research and development. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory built the U.S. first air-defense system. During World War II, Harvard contributed to the development of napalm and sonar systems, and the Belfer Center was formed in 1973 to study arms control as tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union simmered. The CIA has a long-standing history of encouraging undercover agents to enroll at HKS to continue their education.

It’s hard to match MIT, the engineering colossus next door, or Stanford, nestled in Silicon Valley, for clout among recruiters and investors. But graduate schools like the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School are still trying to position themselves at the forefront of military and dual-use innovation.

At the Belfer Center, the focus has never been clearer. Onetime U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who directed the Belfer Center until his death in 2022, was particularly instrumental in cementing defense tech as a focus at Harvard.

Holte said Carter was a major figure in the push to understand Silicon Valley — and recruits from elite schools — as sources of both military technology and civilian innovations. And he was influential in bringing that ethos to campus.

The Technology and National Security Conference at HBS was started by Carter’s students, according to one of the conference’s co-chairs, Moises E. Navas.

Co-founder of aerospace defense company Shield AI Brandon Tseng, a Navy veteran and HBS alumnus, struggled with his startup before he began working with the Harvard Innovation Labs and connected with U.S. Representative Jim Matheson ’82 and eventually Carter.

“And then from there, they just freaking accelerated beyond belief,” Holte said. The Harvard-founded startup has just reached unicorn status, with a 5.3 billion dollar valuation in March.

Making the Pitch

Dylan T. Driscoll ’24 graduated from Harvard last May. Now, he fixes broken parts for Anduril Industries, the autonomous systems company that produces flying drones, underwater missiles, and surveillance equipment.

Driscoll wasn’t new to the world of defense tech. He spent more than seven years in the Marine Corps before college and worked in defense manufacturing for a few months, building what he described as “spy satellites” and aircraft parts for Lockheed Martin KC-130s.

But he wasn’t always dead set on defense, either. In his first two years of undergrad, he planned to go into consulting, he said. His senior year, he was about to get a standing job offer from Tesla.

It was the Technology and National Security Conference at HBS that brought him back to defense — made him feel like he “wasn’t a crazy person” to contemplate entering the industry.

“I think it’s a disservice to the United States that we go into banking, which doesn’t really make anything,” he said.

Driscoll was inspired to go into defense tech because he found an environment that encouraged that path at HBS. But college campuses and defense companies have long harbored disdain for one another.

Thiel, the Palantir co-founder, is famous for giving $200,000 grants to young entrepreneurs on the condition that they forgo — or drop out of — college. This spring, Palantir launched a “Meritocracy Fellowship” for graduating high schoolers to choose instead of college.

“Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree,” the company advertised.

College activists, meanwhile, are not known for their fondness of defense contractors. Pro-Palestine student protesters disrupted a career fair last fall because it featured the CIA and Bank of America, which has worked with a weapons manufacturer that sells to the Israeli military. And the Harvard Undergraduate BGLTQ Business Society canceled a sponsorship with Palantir in 2019 after students voiced concerns.

Anduril has tried to turn that cultural and political clash to its advantage.

The words “Don’t Work at Anduril.com” are displayed on the sides of some of the MBTA Red Line trains that thunder beneath Harvard’s and MIT’s campuses. They’re part of an advertising campaign that Anduril has launched across Boston’s public transit system as it looks to fill 50 positions in the area. The messages are styled, with black paint drips, to look as if a disgruntled employee or anti-war activist had graffitied the company’s signs.

“Anduril is not for everyone,” Jeff Miller, the firm’s vice president of marketing, told The Boston Globe in an email. “That’s the point.”

Student leaders for Harvard Ventures, who held the event with Palantir and whom Palantir sponsors, declined to be interviewed because of the public’s “differing moral views” on Palantir.

At WECode, however, Natalia U. Siwek ’27 said that the Palantir sponsorship lowered the cost of attendance for the conference and enabled attendees to “understand what the company is doing and on their own, decide whether this is something they would be interested in.”

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“They are doing software for drones,” Siwek said. “A big part of it is just engineering.”

Driscoll said that he saw more enthusiasm for defense tech at HBS than among undergraduates, who he described as sometimes “myopic” in their unwillingness to build weapons. For him, he said, Anduril was the place to be.

“We’ve got youth enthusiasm,” Driscoll said. “They want to build cool stuff, and that’s what we give them the opportunity to do. It’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to knock a drone out of the air 40 miles away? Here’s a bunch of money.’”

—Staff writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.

—Staff writer Danielle J. Im can be reached at danielle.im@thecrimson.com.