A&D News

Trive Capital, a Dallas-based private equity firm, announces the acquisition of AI defense platform and solutions company Hypergiant Industries, to complement its current portfolio company Forward Slope. The acquisition is a natural partnership for the two organizations who believe in the future of next-generation, AI-enabled technology solutions to secure both America’s defenses across all military domains and critical infrastructure. Mike Betzer, CEO of Hypergiant, will continue leading the company into its next phase of accelerated growth.

Over the past five years, Hypergiant has emerged as a leader in AI-enabled, cloud-based command and control technologies and deployed solutions. The company created a world-class core geospatial data visualization and actions platform, Command Center. In addition to ingesting large amounts of information, this platform applies real-time threat analysis, makes AI-generated recommendations, and delivers intelligent insights and actions across all domains. Hypergiant has won numerous innovation awards for its AI-enabled defense solutions and is now focused on scaling this joint-all domain spatial intelligence and actionable command center software package.

David Stinnett, Partner at Trive Capital, commented, “Hypergiant’s unique geospatial data visualization capability have positioned the Company at the leading edge of C5ISR technologies that address mission-critical defense priorities. In an increasingly complex battlespace, Hypergiant is capable of rapidly delivering actionable insights to the warfighter. We are thrilled to partner with Mike and the Hypergiant team to support the Company in its next chapter of growth, and to formalize a longer-term partnership with our current portfolio company, Forward Slope.”

Hypergiant has also garnered strong market recognition for its futuristic inventions, including award-winning AI-enabled projects such as the Hypergiant Eos Bioreactor,Hypergiant Project Orion, then Hypergiant Disaster Mapping System, the Hypergiant Chameleon prototype constellation, Project Argus in partnership with Amazon among others. These various innovations focused on expanding the company’s capabilities, adding to its common operating picture platform from autonomous vehicles, to mobile command centers, to various heads up display implementations. 

Included among the company’s select customers are the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, the Department of Homeland Security, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. Army, the National Reconnaissance Office, Boeing, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

“Space, defense, and American critical infrastructure all face similar challenges and need AI-enabled common operating pictures for quick and informed decision making. Our approach is to take government-funded projects, where we are building highly performant and secure, battle-ready solutions, and bring that technology to the private sector with mission specific customization,” said Hypergiant CEO Mike Betzer. “We are excited to partner with Trive as a long-term partner who truly understands the sector and can help accelerate adoption of our platform and offerings to an even broader set of private and public sector clients.”

“Mike Betzer has shown great integrity in his leadership and has continued to deliver on the company’s long-term vision of bringing next-gen AI assisted insights to the core groups that preserve and enable our way of life,” shared Hypergiant founder and now CEO of Colossal Biosciences Ben Lamm. “I am excited to see the company continue to scale its technologies that enable superiority on the battlefield through the Trive acquisition and Mike’s leadership.”

Hypergiant was founded in 2018 by technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm with a goal to bring an AI-enabled approach to an advanced visual multimodal to help organizations across space, defense and critical infrastructure. Hypergiant has over 195 employees and contractors and investors include lead investor Align Capital along with GPG, Perot Jain, Beringer Capital, and Capital Factory. The acquisition comes on the heels of Hypergiant’s most recent expanded $60M+ contract award from the USAF around its command and control platform offering.

HYPERGIANT INDUSTRIES
Hypergiant Industries is an AI company focused on developing world-changing technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems in the areas of space, defense, and critical infrastructure.

KAL Capital acted as an advisor to Trive Capital for this transaction.