Pryzm today announced a $12.2 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) American Dynamism fund, with participation from existing investors XYZ Venture Capital, Amplify.LA, and Forum Ventures. The raise advances Pryzm’s mission to modernize how the federal government discovers, evaluates, and acquires emerging technology, while giving industry a clearer, faster path to identify opportunities, shape demand and compete on capability.
Built by alumni of Palantir and Lockheed Martin, Pryzm connects government and industry on a shared AI-powered platform that helps defense and civilian agencies move faster from concept to contract.
“The future of national defense depends on how fast we can get the right technology into the right hands,” said Nick LaRovere, Co-Founder and CEO of Pryzm. “Procurement shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation. It should be the spark that drives it. With this round led by a16z, we’re accelerating a new era of speed, adaptability, and technological advantage for national security.”
Reclaiming America’s Innovation Advantage
For decades, America’s military has served as a bastion of innovation, fueling the development of technologies that defend our freedoms and transform industry. From the internet to GPS, duct tape to compilers, breakthroughs born of the national security ecosystem have reshaped the world.
But in recent years, the burden of bureaucracy has throttled that innovation engine. Paperwork, opacity and countless information silos have made it harder for government teams to fund and field advanced technologies, and for industry to navigate the process. The result is a widening gap between what’s technologically possible and what the government can actually deploy.
That dynamic is beginning to shift. In a November 7, 2025, address titled “The Arsenal of Freedom,” Secretary of War Hegseth announced sweeping reforms to the Pentagon’s acquisition processes:
“We will foster competition, embrace modularity, and pursue multi-source procurements at every opportunity, moving fast to contract, test, scale, and deploy when a solution is clear.”
The key word here is fast. It’s time to move effectively, with speed.
Pryzm has been building ahead of this moment, supporting major federal programs and innovators like Forterra, Vannevar Labs, HII and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). As the government embarks on this new mandate, Pryzm’s platform provides the digital infrastructure needed to operationalize it, enabling a faster, more open, and more competitive acquisition system that closes the delta between innovation and deployment.
“Pryzm is building the connective tissue between America’s innovation base and its mission buyers,” said David Ulevitch, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “We believe their platform will redefine how the government collaborates with private industry to strengthen our technological edge.”
Powering a Smarter Defense Ecosystem
But translating these reforms into real-world outcomes requires more than policy; it requires systems, data, and tooling capable of executing acquisition at the speed modern defense demands. That’s where Pryzm comes in.
Every year, the U.S. government spends over $900 billion on defense and national security, but much of that process still runs on outdated tools and fragmented systems. Pryzm bridges this gap by giving federal acquisition teams and private-sector innovators a unified, AI-driven view of market intelligence, budgets, and program activity.
“Pryzm isn’t just speeding up procurement. They’re becoming the operating system the entire defense ecosystem runs on. You can feel that shift happening across startups, primes, and government teams,” said Ross Fubini, Founder & Managing Partner, XYZ. “It’s rare to see a company define a category this quickly in a space as complex as federal acquisition.”
For industry, Pryzm delivers real-time insights that help companies identify opportunities, align with funding priorities, and engage the right stakeholders, empowering startups, primes, and dual-use companies to navigate federal capture with confidence.
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