Caroline Hyde

Shield AI has announced it's raised two billion dollars, hitting a valuation of twelve point seven billion dollars, more than double from a year ago.

The defense tech startup raised one point five billion dollars in Series G funding led by Advent International.

Blackstone is putting in an additional five hundred million.

in preferred equity financing.

Shield says it will be using part of the funding to acquire tactical simulation software maker HLON Technology, and the terms for that were undisclosed.

Shield last raised $240 million at a $5.3 billion valuation in March of 2025.

That, by the way, included Bloomberg Beta, the venture firm backed by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of this organization, Cara.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me, Caroline.

It is so interesting to see what has happened in a really short period of time.

We launched Construct Capital early in 2020, pre-COVID 2020, with this belief that we needed to see productivity technology enter.

what we describe as foundational industries, areas like manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, certainly defense tech.

Because when you look at the numbers, productivity was declining in these spaces.

It was literally taking longer to do the work.

A hundred hours of work was taking longer than it had 10, 15 years ago.

And of course, in other sectors, we've seen tremendous growth from a productivity standpoint.

So

We really felt like now was the time to focus on these spaces.

But as you point out, you know, there's a tremendous amount of interest, a tremendous amount of investor interest coming into these spaces.

There's been a 20x increase in Series B dollars going into these spaces since 2020 when we launched the fund.

to today.