Editorial Team
6 min read
Primordial Labs raised $18 million to widen deployment of Anura, its military command software. Existing contracts and demonstrations give it a foothold, but integration counts do not establish sustained use or lower operating costs.
Primordial Labs, a New Haven, Connecticut, software company founded in 2021 by former engineers at defense contractor Lockheed Martin, announced the financing on November 10 to widen deployment of Anura, its natural-language command-and-control software for military equipment. It is selling a common way for troops to direct machines whose separate controls otherwise compete for their attention.
The company says it will expand engineering, product and growth teams, deliver military programs already under contract, and enter additional platforms, domains and allied markets, according to its financing announcement. Lead investor Ballistic Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity and related mission-critical technologies.
The returning investors have backed Primordial through an earlier stage. Squadra Ventures led the seed round announced in May 2023, with Lockheed Martin Ventures and Stony Lonesome Group participating. Primordial emerged from stealth and launched Anura at that time. The Series A therefore finances a product with several years of development and customer work behind it.
Lee Ritholtz, Primordial’s co-founder and chief executive, and Adrian Pope, its co-founder and chief technology officer, met at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, where they built and deployed small uncrewed aircraft systems and payloads. They later helped establish Lockheed’s Artificial Intelligence Center, according to Primordial’s announcement. Lockheed Martin Ventures’ continued participation connects the financing to their former employer.
Ritholtz’s experience also explains the product’s starting point. In a March 2025 demonstration report, he described extensive work on Lockheed’s Stalker XE drone and complaints about its ground-control software. Primordial’s proposed answer is a layer above existing equipment and autonomy, allowing operators to express an objective rather than manage every step through sticks, menus or buttons.
Primordial says Anura uses the operating context to break an operator’s goals and constraints into tasks, coordinate execution, confirm outcomes and adjust when conditions change. Its intended scope includes onboard sensors, communications, displays and connected uncrewed systems.
Examples in a financing report based on an interview with Ritholtz range from telling a small drone to climb to redirecting an armored vehicle’s sensors toward a new point of interest, without memorized syntax. Ritholtz’s stated goal is for soldiers to move between platforms without needing a training course to interact with each machine. That is an ambition for the interface, rather than evidence that platform-specific training has been eliminated.
The distinction from earlier voice controls is a company claim: Ritholtz argues that interpreting intent is more useful than requiring fixed keywords or phrases. Anura also relies on other systems’ capabilities. In the March 2025 report, he described its autonomy as a layer around other providers’ autonomy; the demonstration used aircraft from both Skydio and Teal Drones. Both aircraft makers were competitors in the Army’s Short-Range Reconnaissance program. The report also described a demonstration integration on Black Hornet, the Army’s Soldier Borne Sensor micro-drone.
The same demonstration included directing multiple drones as a team. It established an observable use case beyond a single aircraft, but did not establish reliable control of a large operational swarm.
Ritholtz also said then that Anura ran locally, without large language models or calls to external AI servers. Local processing distinguishes that account from a cloud-dependent conversational assistant. The new financing announcement does not specify the current architecture, and neither account supplies quantified battlefield command-error rates or workload reductions.
Company-reported financing and partnership milestones. These announcements do not measure active users or sustained operational use. Graphic: Magica. Source: Squadra Ventures.
Primordial says Anura is now integrated on more than a dozen crewed and uncrewed platforms across land and air. It is delivering small-drone licenses to multiple Army and U.S. Special Operations Command units and sells through the Army’s UAS Marketplace.
The foothold predates this round. The March 2025 report described contracts with four military program executive offices and five equipment manufacturers covering air and ground platforms. It also described Primordial as providing at least 8,000 Anura licenses that year to Army brigades and divisions testing capabilities in operational environments. That figure concerned licenses for experimentation, not a verified count of active users, completed deployments or enduring purchases.
On October 7, Primordial announced a master teaming agreement with General Dynamics Land Systems, maker of the Abrams tank and Stryker armored vehicle, to bring Anura to its ground combat vehicle portfolio, including Abrams. Primordial also says two 2026 Small Business Innovation Research Phase III awards extend its work to Army rotary-wing aircrews and the Air Force’s MQ-9 drone ground control station.
These measures should not be added together as a customer or adoption total. An integration indicates compatibility; a teaming agreement provides a framework for further work; licenses can support distribution and experimentation. None alone establishes the extent of sustained operational use. The financing announcement discloses no revenue, valuation, license price or quantified training-cost reduction.
In its investment explanation, Ballistic emphasizes Primordial’s use of the Modular Open Systems Approach, an approach intended to let Anura integrate with existing platforms without requiring their redesign. That makes equipment manufacturers important to the business: the software must fit into systems supplied by other companies. Ritholtz said in the March 2025 account that applications used the same underlying software, with forks created to explore new uses. Reusing that foundation is part of Primordial’s case for expanding across platforms.
Roger Thornton, Ballistic’s co-founder and general partner who previously led security products and technology at AT&T, described more than a month of diligence involving military leaders, acquisition executives, operators and a drone demonstration. His account explains the investor’s conviction and access to potential users, but comes from a firm with a financial stake. It is not a published comparison with existing controls or alternative command software.
Thornton also sees possible commercial applications in industries such as mining, energy, logistics and public safety. He argues that real-world interactions could help improve Anura where data rights permit. Those are prospective opportunities, conditional on access to usable data; Primordial says its current focus remains military customers.
Ritholtz said Primordial was considering offices in Detroit and Huntsville, Alabama, and expansion overseas, according to the financing interview. The immediate commitment is to deliver programs already under contract while extending the software to more platforms.
To assess the return on that expansion, military buyers need evidence beyond compatibility: how reliably commands are interpreted under operational conditions, how often crews use the software, and whether it reduces workload and training time compared with existing controls. Pricing and integration costs would also determine whether a shared interface saves money. The round funds wider delivery; the published evidence does not yet resolve those operational and economic questions.
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