Lockheed Martin Ventures open to making ‘defense

BETHESDA, Md. — Lockheed Martin’s venture capital fund is increasingly interested in technology focused on defense, its general manager said today. “A lot of our investments, I’d say 90% plus, are still kind of dual-use,” Chris Moran, who heads Lockheed Martin Ventures, told reporters. “But in the last couple years, we’ve made a few defense-specific investments, which we probably wouldn’t have contemplated before.” It’s “shifting us from just pure commercial” technology that can be applied to defense “to looking at some pure defense stuff,” Moran said on the sidelines of an event at company headquarters highlighting 18 of the fund’s portfolio companies. Lockheed Martin in April announced it would increase the fund’s investment capacity from $400 million to $1 billion. In recent years, Moran added, Lockheed Martin Ventures has focused its investments on quantum, materials, advanced manufacturing, sensors and “then more recently, more of these small autonomous systems.” Sarah Hiza, Lockheed’s senior vice president of technology and strategy innovation, told reporters at the same event that “until recently, we were generally more domestic focused, and now we are much more intentional about international.” In July, the contractor announced Lockheed Martin Ventures would open a London office and seek to invest at least $100 million in the United Kingdom and Europe. “The venture world really is the eyes and ears to go out and look [at] what technologies, what companies are available that we can mature and integrate into our solutions,” Hiza said. “Strategically, it’s really important for the venture world to provide, I’ll say, resiliency and growth of our supply chain.” She added: “Venture is a really important part of our technology development process.”