Steven Simoni Built a $2.2B Company to Reinvent the Way Wars Are Fought

Bullfrog maker bets the US is losing the drone war

Steven Simoni thinks drones have made the modern battlefield unrecognizable. His company, Allen Control Systems, builds Bullfrog, an autonomous weapon station that shoots down drones using a layered computer vision stack and on-edge ballistics, possible only after NVIDIA's 2017 and 2018 cards. ACS has raised $242m at a $2.2bn valuation and wants to become an air defense prime selling multiple weapon stations and interceptors. Simoni expects five dark years shaped by debt cycles and proxy conflict, then a historic bull run.

Takeaways

• Bullfrog is an autonomous counter-drone weapon station. Steven Simoni describes it as a robotic gun that auto-targets drones using a layered computer vision stack and a laser rangefinder that feeds on-edge ballistics. It could not be built this way until NVIDIA's newer cards arrived in 2017 and 2018.
• Legacy primes capture most defense spending. Simoni's back-of-envelope split of a $1.5tn budget gives $1.2tn to primes such as Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing and Raytheon, and $300bn to everyone else. He says new defense startups need a battlefield product within 24 to 36 months.
• Patriot interceptors cost ten times a Shahed. Simoni criticizes continued spending on Patriots, including $68bn, because a Patriot costs ten times more than a Shahed, so the US loses money on every defense. Iran is making jet-powered Shaheds that fly about 500 kilometres an hour.
• Drones turned the front line into a wasteland. Simoni calls the 2017 Armenia-Azerbaijan war the first full drone war, described in Seven Seconds to Die. He says the front line in Ukraine is a five-mile wasteland where drones kill any human.
• ACS raised $242m at a $2.2bn valuation. The Austin company now has about 380 employees, much of it manufacturing. It is shipping Bullfrogs to the battlefield three years into development, and Inspired Capital was one of its first investors at a pre-seed equivalent.
• ACS aims to sell a family of weapons. The government prefers to buy a whole family of products from one vendor, which Simoni calls sales efficiency. ACS plans electronic warfare systems, kinetic weapon stations, laser weapon stations and interceptors, and Bullfrog will be mounted on Saronic's unmanned vessels.
• Simoni predicts five dark years before AI utopia. Drawing on Ray Dalio's debt-cycle theory and Treasury Secretary Bessent's measures, he sees the opening stages of more conflict, with China fighting through proxies such as Iran and Russia. He still expects a great bull run and superintelligence a few breakthroughs away.

From Bbot to Bullfrog

1. Inspired Capital passed on Bbot because restaurant technology was not a big enough market.