| Welcome back! What do you get when you offset investors' recent loathing of software startups with their lust for defense tech? Fast-growing Onebrief, the latest startup to double its valuation in a short span after raising $200 million this week from Battery Ventures and Sapphire Ventures at a $2.15 billion valuation, including the new investment. Onebrief isn't building autonomous drones, hypersonic missiles or solid rocket motors. It's selling collaboration software for military command centers, aiming to displace the Microsoft Office suite and developing tools akin to Google Maps, Monday.com and Figma for military staffers. That sounds niche, but it is becoming a lucrative business. The startup is generating nearly $90 million in annual recurring revenue, two people close to it told me. Its valuation is about 24 times that revenue pace. That's rich for a software startup these days, although there are certainly defense—and AI—startups with less revenue valued more highly. The company expects to roughly double those sales again this year, the people said. Grant Demaree, Onebrief's co-founder and CEO, wouldn't discuss sales figures. But he told me the company has grown quickly in part because it sells into military branches' discretionary budgets, which do not need explicit earmarks from Congress, meaning it isn't "waiting for an entire appropriation cycle." As it gets bigger, it will likely need to get money from the Pentagon budget more explicitly as a program of record. But those deals can take a while to win. The most valuable company that sells a lot of software to the Pentagon is, of course, $422 billion market cap Palantir. Demaree said his company fills a need the data analytics giant doesn't because Onebrief users are "trying to generate something that didn't previously exist," unlike Palantir, which relies on existing datasets. "We're serving totally different users," he said. That makes me wonder if Onebrief's future is inside Palantir, which might want to use its lucrative stock price and cash haul as acquisition firepower. Investment firms that would benefit from a sale are Onebrief's venture capital backers, which include General Catalyst, 9Yards and Human Capital. These all have invested in other well-known defense firms like Anduril but haven't yet had significant exits in the sector. Other Onebrief backers, Sapphire and Insight Partners, are more traditional software investors. The startup is among the many firms seeing their fortunes rise alongside geopolitical tensions, which have expanded recently from China and Russia to Venezuela and Iran. Demaree said his firm is benefiting from a more tech-friendly ethos among Pentagon leaders, which trickles down into the lower ranks of officialdom. He said: "If you're a [colonel or capital] and you've been encouraged to innovate, and you're evaluated based on your success modernizing headquarters, then you're much, much more inclined to move quickly—and you'll have higher standards in expecting very good software." Check out our latest episode of TITV in which we debrief the exits at Thinking Machines Lab. | 
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