Editor’s note: Christopher Wolff wrote this essay in May 2026, when Edge Orbital planned to build early-warning monitoring for rural utilities. Edge Orbital is now developing NowScape, software that turns everyday photos and video into a 3D view of a real place that keeps updating. The essay is kept as a record of that thinking, with factual corrections made in October 2026.
A founder’s note on the career that put me at the bottom of the wireless stack, the pivots that changed what Edge Orbital is building, and the customers it is building for.
The confession
I started Edge Orbital expecting to build a defense company. I’m building something else now.
The pivot wasn’t a strategy reversal. It was the slow recognition — across about eighteen months of customer conversations, technical iteration, and one consumer-safety detour I didn’t expect to take — that the architecture I’d been building has its truest home in a market the defense thesis had taught me to overlook. The rural electric cooperative. The community-solar battery operator. The county-owned water-treatment plant. The substation that sits on a distribution feeder no one is profitably watching because the procurement-consulting-fee economics of the incumbent monitoring vendors don’t reach below the Fortune-500 procurement cycle.
That tier — by population and by exposure to actual physical-security incidents — is the majority of the U.S. distribution grid. Federal infrastructure policy already knows it. The Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program has $10.5 billion across three grant programs, including $2.5 billion in §40101(c) grid resilience grants, and much of it can reach exactly the buyer tier the incumbent vendors don’t reach. Funding and code changes are arriving for the same customer. The procurement options haven’t followed.
That gap is what Edge Orbital is being built into. This is the note on how I got here.
What the atoms taught me
The American Dynamism investing thesis — popularized by Andreessen Horowitz’s dedicated fund and now adopted across the infrastructure-tech VC ecosystem — bets that the next generation of national capability will come from venture-backed startups building hard technology in the physical world. The shorthand inside the category is “atoms, not bits”: a reaction to the prior decade of software-first venture capital, which built the application layer of modern life on top of an industrial base it largely ignored.
The first wave of the bet is the defense and aerospace cohort — Anduril, Hadrian, Varda, Apex, Saronic. Visible, conviction-led, the easy part. The second wave is the layer underneath those bets: the grid that powers them, the substations that distribute that power, the battery storage that makes it dispatchable, and the rural and small-industrial sites where most of the actual atoms-not-bits work happens. The second wave is less visible because the customer tier is less visible. Co-op general managers are not on coastal investor decks. Distribution-feeder substations are not on portfolio-company landing pages. But the physics of the bet — that the United States runs on infrastructure most software people have forgotten about — is the same physics either way.
I have spent more than thirty years at the bottom of the wireless stack. That’s where you learn this lesson the hard way.
More than thirty years at the bottom of the stack
I built one of the first citywide Wi-Fi networks, in Arizona. I ran business wireless networks for fifteen years after that, in places where trenching fiber was not actually an option. I built municipal fiber where the budget allowed it.
The recurring lesson, across all of it: the bottom of every wireless layer is where physical infrastructure meets reality. The application layer assumes the network exists. The network layer assumes the radio works. The radio layer assumes the spectrum is clean, the power is reliable, the site is reachable, and the operator can get to it when something breaks. Those assumptions are where everything quietly fails.
The startups that win at the bottom of the stack are the ones that take those assumptions seriously enough to engineer against them. The ones that don’t — that ship products designed against the assumptions of the application layer — lose to physics. Cellular base stations need backhaul that isn’t always there. Cloud-dependent security cameras need uplinks that fail during the exact incidents they were installed to record. Centralized monitoring needs a contract with a security monitoring center the operator can’t afford and integration work with the utility’s control-system team that the operator doesn’t have.
I am not the first person to notice this. I am one of the people who has spent enough time at the bottom of the stack to know the shape of the failure mode by feel. That muscle memory is what Edge Orbital is built around — not a patent, although Edge Orbital has patent applications in progress. The shape of the architecture follows the shape of the customer’s actual operating reality, because more than thirty years of getting it wrong in less-honest ways taught me what the operator’s actual operating reality is.
What I thought Edge Orbital was
The original idea was a radio network for the military that keeps working when cell service doesn’t, with civilian uses as a second market. The market thesis was that the prime contractors couldn’t build at venture velocity, and the venture-backed startups couldn’t credibly build military radio systems without the kind of founder who’d been at the bottom of the wireless stack for a few decades.
Some of that still holds. Edge Orbital has patent applications in progress, and defense uses were within the scope of what we were building.
What turned out to be wrong, or at least incomplete, was the assumption that the defense customer was the right wedge. The defense customer is real, but the defense procurement cycle is slow, and the defense customer’s actual operating environment is one I cannot get to without a special defense contracting route (an Other Transaction agreement) and a year of program-office relationships I had not yet built. The architecture I was building had a faster, larger, and clearer customer waiting elsewhere — I just hadn’t gone looking for it yet.
The consumer-safety detour is what surfaced where the architecture actually fit.
What the consumer detour taught me
About a year into Edge Orbital, we built Tripwire Recon, a capture-the-flag game for iPhone.
I started thinking about the people around someone who would notice when something was wrong.
From the walk home to the grid edge
Once I stopped thinking only about defense, the next customer became visible.
An operations manager at a rural electric cooperative is operating an infrastructure system. The system has perimeter exposure: substations, distribution feeders, line equipment, leased pole assets. The threat profile is behavioral — the scouting visits before copper is stolen, and the equipment status anomalies a perimeter camera alone would miss. The operator does not have a contract with a security monitoring center. The operator does not have a budget for integration work with the control-system team for a new sensor stack. The operator does have a federally funded resilience program designed for exactly their tier, and a copper-theft loss curve that is now a baseline operating cost rather than an exception.
The same design question applies to a substation fence line as to a walk home: notice what an attentive person on site would notice. Different operator, same pattern: perception at the site, sensor fusion, behavioral early warning, and alerts that go to the operator’s actual workflow rather than to a remote analyst contract.
An often-cited Department of Energy estimate puts the cost of copper theft to American businesses at about $1 billion per year. The 2022 Moore County attack, on two Duke Energy substations, left about 45,000 customers without power for up to four days. The parts of the grid the legacy monitoring market has structurally failed to serve are the small, rural and distributed parts.
This is the second American Dynamism wave. The first wave funded the defense and aerospace cohort. The second wave funds the layer that powers them — and the rural, distributed, operator-budget tier that funds the layer that powers them.
Where a small company fits
The trap inside the second wave is to read it as “compete with the F500 monitoring vendors at lower price points.” That framing loses on first principles. The incumbent monitoring vendors are not architecturally wrong — they are architecturally tuned for a customer tier whose math works at their cost structure. The math that works for an enterprise utility CFO is not the math that works for a co-op operations manager. The enterprise sales motion does not fit a line item. The line item does not carry an enterprise sales motion.
The right framing is structural. There is a buyer tier the incumbents cannot profitably serve. The buyer tier covers most of the land area in the country. The buyer tier has a real and growing threat exposure. The buyer tier now has federal funding aligned with its specific cost structure. And the buyer tier has few security options priced for it, because the architecture the incumbents have been priced to support is not buildable for that customer at their cost structure.
This is where I think a small company fits. Not competing with the F500 platform vendors. Operating below the price floor they cannot cross without breaking their go-to-market. Architecturally distinct: edge-resident, sensor-fused, operator-priced, designed against the operations-manager spreadsheet from day one rather than the enterprise-procurement RFP. Federally funded at the buyer-tier match. Dual-use by design, in the precise sense the term means in American Dynamism investing — the underlying perception, fusion, and early-warning capability is designed to serve both civilian critical infrastructure and adjacent dual-use applications without re-engineering.
Reindustrialization at the pole is not an abstract phrase to me. It is the literal demand profile of a rural electric co-op covering a dozen counties, trying to harden its substations on a budget that hasn’t moved, with a federal funding program designed for exactly that customer, and a security architecture that has been absent from its reachable procurement options.
What I’m building, capability-level
Edge Orbital is pre-pilot, and we are explicit about that. What we are building toward is field deployment with the architecture above and the customer tier above as the explicit design constraints. We do not have a deployed customer count. We do not have an LOI. We do not have a hardware vendor brand to point at. We have the architecture, patent applications in progress, the founder credibility, and the customer-development conviction that the buyer tier is real, that the threat profile is real, that the federal-funding alignment is real, and that the architectural shape we have been building has an honest home in that tier.
The capability is three properties designed to work together.
First, each site stands alone. Every monitoring node would run full perception and early warning locally. No central cloud dependency. No control-system integration cost. No always-on monitoring fee. A node is designed to keep working during a regional internet outage or a sustained attack on backhaul. Decentralized resilience as an architectural property, not a marketing word.
Second, operator-budget pricing. The system is designed against the operations-manager spreadsheet first. Edge Orbital is designing per-site pricing so that a co-op covering a dozen counties could deploy across its full footprint, not just one site. Without that, the buyer tier does not open. The architecture follows the unit economics, not the other way around.
Third, early warning on the patterns that matter. Copper-theft signatures (extended after-hours dwell, irregular movement against the fence line, vehicle stage-and-return patterns). Physical-attack precursors, such as repeated night visits. Equipment status anomalies a perimeter camera alone would miss. Detection would combine sensors and run at the site, and it is designed to alert before the failure completes, not to leave a forensic record afterward.
This is what I mean by infrastructure for the unguarded, and I mean it literally: the unguarded edge of the grid, the unguarded perimeter of the small industrial site, the unguarded approach to the regional water-treatment plant. These are the places critical-infrastructure policy now asks someone to monitor, that the incumbent stack was never priced to reach, and that adversaries have already identified.
What I’m not building
I am not building an enterprise platform priced down for small customers. The architecture is genuinely different.
I am not building a video management system. I am not building an alarm aggregator. The category is early warning before an incident, next to acoustic detection during one, CCTV review after one, and national-scale defense platforms — and it is designed to cost less per site than any of them.
I am not building a defense vendor. The architecture is dual-use, by design, and the defense application is a real and explicit part of what we will sell into. But the wedge is the civilian critical-infrastructure tier, and the credibility I owe my investors and my customers is to say so plainly rather than to wrap the civilian thesis in a defense wrapper because defense is the easier conversation to have on a coastal Zoom.
I am not, finally, building anything I cannot demonstrate. Capability before claim is the standing rule for what we say in public — to investors, to operators, to the press. Pre-pilot means pre-pilot. Pre-hardware means pre-hardware. What I have built — the architecture, patent applications in progress, the customer development, the founder credibility — is what I have built. What I have not built — the deployed pilot count, the customer LOI, the verified field data — I will tell you I have not built, until I have built it.
The work ahead
The American Dynamism investing thesis is, fundamentally, an argument that the venture capital industry’s prior decade of software-first conviction missed a generation of physical-world technology that the United States now needs at scale. The argument is correct. The portfolio is being built. The first wave is visible.
The second wave — the layer underneath, the customer tier the first wave depends on — is being built more quietly because the customer tier itself is quieter. Rural electric cooperative general managers are not on coastal investor decks. Distribution-feeder substations are not on portfolio-company landing pages. The 832 rural electric cooperatives serving 42 million Americans across 56% of the U.S. landmass are not the visible part of the American Dynamism portfolio. They are the part the visible portfolio depends on.
Edge Orbital is being built for them. The architecture, the unit economics, the federal-funding alignment, the dual-use breadth — all of it. Infrastructure for the unguarded, built at the bottom of the wireless stack, by an engineer who has spent more than thirty years learning what the operator’s actual operating reality looks like.
If the second wave aligns with your portfolio mandate, the investor brief describes the company and what it still needs to prove. If you write about American Dynamism, distributed energy, rural electrification, or the second wave of the category, you can reach me through the contact page.
— Christopher Wolff