Shield AI

On February 26, 2026, over the Mojave Desert, Hivemind completes a full set of mission-autonomy test points aboard Anduril's YFQ-44A Fury, with the aircraft switching control mid-flight between Hivemind and Anduril's own Lattice for Mission Autonomy stack under the Air Force's new Autonomy Government Reference Architecture, the interface standard meant to let multiple companies compete to fly the same airframe.

On March 26, 2026 Shield AI announces $2 billion of new capital: a $1.5 billion Series G led by Advent International and co-led by JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, plus $500 million of preferred equity from Blackstone and a further $250 million delayed-draw facility. Valuation reaches $12.7 billion, up roughly 140%. In the same announcement it acquires Aechelon Technology, a high-fidelity simulation company, to train the Hivemind Foundation Model for Defense in simulation.

On April 20, 2026 the Navy selects Shield AI to compete for task orders under an up-to-$800 million contractor-owned, contractor-operated ISR program flown with V-BAT. The company cites more than 100,000 pounds of narcotics interdicted, hundreds of targeting operations in Ukraine, and prior Coast Guard and Marine Corps deployments as the track record behind the selection.

On May 19, 2026 the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering selects Shield AI to integrate Hivemind onto LUCAS, a roughly $35,000 one-way attack drone derived from Iran's Shahed-136 and built by SpektreWorks, so a single operator can coordinate a swarm of ten or more of the low-cost munitions in real time. It is Shield AI's first publicized move into expendable one-way-attack munitions rather than reusable aircraft, with an operational demonstration planned for fall 2026.

Jacob Miller, a former member of Shield AI's Mishap Review Board who reviewed drone-crash and injury investigations, files a lawsuit reported by Bloomberg on May 29, 2026 alleging he was placed on retaliatory administrative leave after raising aircraft-safety complaints, that safety data was manipulated, and that a senior director's harassment of staff went unaddressed. The suit also describes an unauthorized July 2025 test flight in which a pilot's child was injured during an evasive maneuver and says the incident went unreported to the Mishap Review Board.

A Reuters investigation published June 5, 2026 reports more than 50 V-BAT crashes over 18 months, an incident on May 12, 2026 in which a Romanian navy officer lost two fingers to a V-BAT propeller during a training exercise off the Texas coast, and whistleblower complaints alleging that employees raising safety concerns were pushed out. It follows an April 2024 incident in which a V-BAT partially amputated three fingers of a US Navy service member, after which Shield AI developed unassisted launch and recovery.

On June 17, 2026, alongside the FQ-42A and FQ-44A airframe production awards, the Air Force sets up Collaborative Combat Aircraft mission autonomy as its own competition. Six vendors receive baseline six-year contracts (Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI), and three of them, Shield AI among them, win competitive production awards funding the first of two six-month phases, leading to the selection of a primary autonomy provider for Increment 1 by summer 2027. Treating autonomy as a separately competed capability rather than a subsystem of the airframe is what puts a software company on equal footing with the airframe primes.

Shield AI completes its acquisition of Aechelon Technology on June 22, 2026, three months after announcing the deal alongside the Series G round. Aechelon's high-fidelity visual simulation and physics-based sensor-modeling technology, used on national-security programs including the Pentagon's Joint Simulation Environment, is folded into the Hivemind Foundation Model for Defense training pipeline.

On July 20, 2026 Shield AI and GE Aerospace complete integration, actuation, and engine light-off of the F110-GE-129E with AVEN, an axisymmetric vectoring exhaust nozzle originally built for an F-16 thrust-vectoring program in the 1990s and refurbished for X-BAT. GE calls it the first fully integrated test campaign of its kind since that program, and it clears the propulsion path to vertical flight.

In June 2026 Poland signs a roughly $16 million deal for MQ-35 V-BAT systems for the Polish Navy, with deliveries due by the end of the year. It follows the Royal Netherlands Navy declaring V-BAT operational in March 2026 after shipboard trials aboard HNLMS Johan de Witt off northern Norway, with 12 systems bought for eight vessels.

On August 24, 2026 Shield AI, Sedaro and NOVI Space demonstrate the first on-orbit flight of Hivemind, running aboard a NOVI satellite in low Earth orbit as lead of a simulated six-satellite constellation. Over a 24-hour experiment validated by Sedaro's SAFE edge-safety framework, Hivemind autonomously generates and executes 189 commands covering imaging tasking, health diagnostics, battery state and pointing, extending Hivemind beyond aircraft, ground vehicles and drone boats into space.

On September 1, 2026 Shield AI said L3Harris licensed Tracker C-UAS, a computer-vision counter-drone software product, to equip the VAMPIRE platform with passive AI detection on electro-optical and infrared video, without radar or radio emissions. The companies had previously demonstrated Tracker with L3Harris WESCAM MX-Series sensors. Shield AI said VAMPIRE systems have logged more than 350,000 operational hours and shot down hundreds of hostile drones in combat since 2023, and that Tracker is available for licensing on other platforms operators already use.

On September 3, 2026 Aviation Week reported that GE Aerospace was shipping the refurbished Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle to Shield AI after more than 100 hours of ground tests on the F110-GE-129E at Peebles, Ohio. Defense One, writing from GE's Lynn factory on September 4, said the next gate is a tethered vertical hover by year-end, with the prototype hanging from a 180-foot crane so engineers can buy down hover-stability risk before free flight. Shield AI's X-BAT page still lists first VTOL flights in 2026, mission capability in 2028, and production in 2029.

On August 31, 2026 Taiwan's Central News Agency reported that the Navy's 2026-2029 public defense budget includes NT$36 billion to buy 280 shipborne V-BAT aircraft, 140 control systems and 82 transport vehicles, after the program was moved out of the classified budget. Army Recognition, citing Liberty Times, said the buy is worth about $1.14 billion and is phased 40 aircraft in 2026, 110 in 2027, 64 in 2028 and 66 in 2029, larger than Shield AI's entire late-2024 delivered fleet. This is a funded procurement program, not a confirmed signed contract with Shield AI.

On August 6, 2026 Shield AI and Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology announced a coordinated autonomous search with three NCSIST Mighty Hornet III UAVs. NCSIST engineers, with Shield AI support, put Hivemind on the aircraft in less than three months; the software launched, teamed, routed around a no-fly zone, and landed the three drones. The demo closed the original February 2026 integration contract and produced a significant expansion to use Hivemind more broadly across NCSIST programs. Taipei Times reported on September 14 that Shield AI has a Taipei 101 office, plans to double local staff the following year, and that co-founder Brandon Tseng said Hivemind has been used on more than 40 platforms.

At MSPO, Shield AI, Polish Armaments Group (PGZ) and Military Aircraft Works No. 2 (WZL-2) signed a five-year letter of intent covering cooperation on design, production, delivery and sustainment of X-BAT in Poland, plus Hivemind, V-BAT, MRO, training, supply-chain participation and technology transfer. Defence24 reported the detailed work-share and sites will be set in follow-on agreements. WZL-2 is already expanding F110 engine maintenance, the same engine family that powers X-BAT. CEO Ryan Tseng said the industrial base should build and support X-BAT for Poland and export. The LOI is not a production contract.

On September 28, 2026 Shield AI and Kraken Technology Group demonstrated two Hivemind-enabled K3 SCOUT uncrewed surface vessels running a coordinated ISR search in Portsmouth, using radar, cameras and AIS to classify a vessel of interest, escort it, then replan. Shield AI called it its first UK maritime autonomy demonstration and said the firms plan further joint trials with UK and NATO partners in contested environments over the coming year. Kraken, which is not in the catalog, recently delivered 20 K3 SCOUTs to the Royal Navy under Project BEEHIVE.

On March 6, 2025 Shield AI raises $240 million in an F-1 round at a $5.3 billion valuation, with strategic money from L3Harris and Hanwha Aerospace alongside Andreessen Horowitz, aimed at selling Hivemind Enterprise to other manufacturers rather than only flying it in-house. Days later, on March 12, enterprise-software veteran Gary Steele is named CEO, with co-founder Ryan Tseng moving to president.

In October 2025 Shield AI reveals X-BAT, an autonomous VTOL fighter with more than 2,000 nautical miles of range and a 50,000-foot ceiling, designed so three fit in the deck space of one legacy fighter. GE Aerospace is selected as propulsion partner in November 2025, and a flight-test site is stood up at Newton City/County Airport in Kansas.

Shield AI buys Martin UAV, which brings the V-BAT airframe, and Heron Systems, whose AI agent had beaten a human F-16 pilot 5-0 in DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials. The two purchases turn a small-drone company into an autonomy company with a Group 3 aircraft to sell.

Brandon Tseng, a Navy SEAL who watched his unit take casualties clearing buildings blind in Uruzgan province, starts Shield AI in San Diego with his brother Ryan Tseng and engineer Andrew Reiter, on $100,000 from friends and family. The founding product is Nova, a quadcopter that maps and searches buildings on its own with no GPS and no operator stick time.