Can AI Predict the Pentagon’s Next Purchase? New Defense Startup Thinks So

For decades, investors have had to make educated guesses on which companies will receive the federal government’s next big defense contracts. These are often million-dollar or even billion-dollar decisions that can move capital markets virtually overnight.

The technology company HighGround has built a data and intelligence platform that takes a deeper dive into defense capital markets, recently landing $6.5 million dollars in seed funding to collect budget, procurement and vendor information from hundreds of federal sources and add them into a single interface for investors to understand and predict where the market is moving.

Those investors, in theory, can use the data to make sound, profitable investments.

“Defense deserves the same analytical foundation that equity research and private credit have had for decades,” HighGround co-founder and CEO John Price told Military.com. “The government tells you exactly what it’s going to buy, when, and from whom.

“What’s been missing is the infrastructure to turn that signal into conviction. And that’s what we built.”

Mission to Close Defense Spending Information Gap

Price is a former Green Beret and policy advisor for government defense and technology initiatives, previously working on Wall Street prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

He spent his career split between defense and capital markets, noticing an information gap.

“It starts all the way at the congressional and presidential budget request, how much money is earmarked to spend,” Price said. “It’s volumes of information that is essentially stacked and left to investors to figure out where the government is buying, and therefore, where they should invest.”

Analysts compare it to the Bloomberg Terminal, a well-known software system that allows finance professionals to monitor and analyze real-time financial market data, make trades, and stay on top of breaking news. It’s considered the industry standard used by hedge funds, banks and brokerages around the world.

HighGround narrows that data even more, to focus on defense and aerospace sectors. The result is a live model of how the government is actually spending, and how signals are presented before quarterly filings.

The information is then put into readily available AI platforms including Claude and ChatGPT.

“For me, it really is about understanding capital markets,” Price said. “How the government affects things from a macro to micro level. But it’s not easy to understand. Things don’t directly line up, and the average person wants answers.”

From the investment side, I want to understand who the winners and losers are going to be.

HighGround’s platform will essentially follow the money trail, giving investors, advisors and operators the same transparency in government markets that Bloomberg gives in public markets.

“We look at where the funding is filtering down, and who the maverick contractors and officers [are],” Price said. “When we talk about the Pentagon, there just hasn’t been that kind of one-stop understanding.”

Typically, analyzing defense spending from the outside involves fragmented government databases, institutional memory and expert intuition. Some analysts reference it as the “secret sauce” used to make billion-dollar decisions.

HighGround believes that operating model is no longer good enough, and desires its own platform to become the go-to source for defense and aerospace investing.

“No one’s ever really done it before, and we want to make it understandable for everyone,” Price said. “The goal is to make government spending easy to track. It’s not hard, it’s just different—and it’s not taught anywhere.”

Using Artificial Intelligence to Leverage Investment Data

What has helped HighGround as it has built its platform is the advent of artificial intelligence.

Already, AI models including Claude and ChatGPT have become popular and commonplace among individuals seeking to glean information, ask questions, conduct monotonous tasks, or get answers. HighGround will also tap into AI to do the same for its customer base.

“What we’re doing was basically impossible without AI, allowing the information to be scaled and drilled down fast and in digestible amounts,” Price said. “Because of the amount of information available, we can make our platform pretty deep and wide to give people the information they need to make sound trading decisions.”

The idea of such a specialized information platform was attractive to investors, including Next Frontier Capital, Tandem Ventures, Fulcrum Capital, and Context Ventures—all of which have signed on to deliver the $6.5 million in seed money that HighGround is using to bring its platform to life.

“HighGround is building the intelligence layer this market has needed for decades,” Les Craig, general partner at Next Frontier Capital, said in a statement. “John and his team have the fluency on both sides to provide immense value to every allocator, operator and advisor making high-stakes decisions in the defense market.”