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In July, Cyberscoop.com reported on the launch of America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), which is an extraordinary public/private partnership and non-profit organization dedicated to America’s Great Power competitive advantage through global technology leadership in what some call “deep tech” or “frontier tech.”
The initial Cyberscoop coverage suggested that the fund was dedicated to cybersecurity, but upon further research and analysis, the fund is designed for a much broader portfolio of technology investments. By all accounts, the AFF is serious business and a refreshing private sector commitment at scale – with tech industry heavyweights putting financial resources on the table along with the unique expertise of equally as impressive a roster of government policy experts:
“An investment fund supported by the White House and partially bankrolled by tech heavyweights Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Newmark is making a big bet that “deep technologies” will give the U.S. the edge over China — especially when it comes to cybersecurity. In addition to donations from former Schmidt, Palantir co-founder Thiel and Craigslists founder Newmark, AFF’s high-level connections are evident in the national security and industry credentials of its board of directors, which includes former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy; Ashton B. Carter, former secretary of defense; former Deputy Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Joanne Isham; former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano; and H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser.
As a for-profit investment fund housed within a nonprofit organization, AFF will be uniquely positioned to leverage the assets of a for-profit business while ensuring that the overall organizational mission stays on track and focused on deep tech, its founders say. Thiel, Schmidt, Newmark and other donors have given money to the nonprofit as opposed to the fund, AFF leaders said.” (1)
Unlike most venture capital funds, America’s Frontier Fund (AFF) has not announced the actual total amount of its investment capital. For now, it is messaging mission, strategic partnership, and priorities. The newly announced AFF will focus on the following areas of deep tech innovation:
Gilman Louie is the CEO of the AFF. Louie co-founded and ran the CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel and is currently a member of President Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Again, the Cyberscoop coverage of the AFF focused on the potential impact of the fund on “frontier tech” innovation in cybersecurity, but the AFF website and PR announcements do not organize the fund around a cybersecurity focus. However, Louie did comment on the potential of cyber innovation:
“‘Most of these technologies will soon be increasingly embedded in cybersecurity. Cyber’s going to radically change over the next five or six years from the traditional way that we think of layered defenses into a much more real-time algorithmic kind of competition. It’s going to be machine on machine.’ (1)
Louie said that speed in the cyber realm will be essential to national security moving forward. This need for speed is shaping AFF investment decisions and will play out, for example, in the fund’s focus on creating diversity in the chip supply chain. It also will be important to U.S. national security to ‘build algorithms to adapt dynamically,’ a growing pressure that Louie said is driven in large part by artificial intelligence and machine learning’s increasing role in cyberwarfare.
Former longtime NSA official Rick Ledgett told CyberScoop that AFF addresses a critical tension that national security officials are grappling with — that is, while the private sector is now clearly ground zero for deep tech research and development, the private sector’s need to focus on profits does not always serve national security well: ‘The private sector is [investing] principally for profit motive … so that can cause you to make a decision in terms of pursuing tech or bringing it to market that is great for profit, but not so good for national security,’ said Ledgett, who is now a managing director at Paladin Capital Management, a small investment firm focused on cybersecurity. Investors have to date largely focused on software while staying away from deep tech, according to AFF co-founder and president Jordan Blashek. Deep tech often involves technical risk, hardware development, and longer timelines to reach commercial scale, Blashek said, so few existing funds focus on it. (1)
The AFF also grew out of the initial establishment of the Quad Investor Network by the White House in late May:
The Quad Investor Network [is] an “independent private consortium of trusted technology leaders from the Quad nations with the aim of identifying and developing bold initiatives to strengthen joint research, development, and investment for foundational technologies, including microelectronics, 5G/6G, quantum, advanced energy and materials, and biotechnology.” (2)
We are hard pressed to think of a major geopolitical initiative that is housed at a newly formed non-profit, but such is the case of the QIN, as the AFF also announced in May that it “will lead the Quad Investor Network (QIN), a new initiative that aims to bring together leading technology investors, executives, and founders from four democratic nations to strengthen cooperation and joint investment into emerging technologies and supply chain infrastructure.
The QIN will be managed by AFF as a critical initiative to develop deep technology capabilities with allies and partners.”
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About the Author
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence