Brandon Tseng has said he cried in the shower for about half an hour.
He was a Naval Academy graduate who had wanted to be a SEAL since he was ten, when he watched Under Siege and The Rock. Then came the news that he had not been given a SEAL slot and was being sent to surface warfare instead. He told the Shawn Ryan Show in October 2025 it was the most soul-crushing day of his life up to that point. He called the surface-ship job a spiritual torment.
As David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post, Tseng's unit took casualties in Uruzgan province after a hostile building was poorly scouted.
He was born in Houston and grew up mostly in Seattle from age ten, then finished high school in Florida as his father's corporate jobs moved the family. He was the third of four kids; his father, an electrical engineer, would ask why he had not scored 100% on a test. A grandfather had graduated from the Naval Academy. Tseng did get to the teams eventually, and served seven years in the Navy, with deployments to Afghanistan. He has also said he failed the tread-water test at SEAL training four times, awkward for a former water polo player.
The idea for Shield AI is traced to Afghanistan. As David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post, Tseng's unit took casualties in Uruzgan province after a hostile building was poorly scouted. Send something in first, and make it smart enough to work without a pilot.
His older brother Ryan started the company, and Brandon has said Ryan had earlier sold a wireless power company to Qualcomm. In 2015, with Andrew Reiter, they launched in San Diego on about $100,000 from friends and family. A contract from the Defense Innovation Unit came in 2016. Nova, a lidar quadcopter that flies without GPS, went to the Middle East in 2018.
Then the founders faced a limit. Brandon has said the quadcopter alone could not support a large business, so the company widened out into Hivemind, its autonomy software, and the V-BAT drone it gained through Martin UAV. A $7.2 million Air Force contract in 2021 came as its valuation passed $1 billion.
The costs were real. In April 2024 a V-BAT partially amputated three fingers of a Navy service member, who fully recovered; flights were restricted for months. China put the company on its Unreliable Entities list in April 2025. In March 2025 Gary Steele became chief executive, and Ryan, who had started it all, moved to chief strategic officer. Brandon stayed as president.
The money kept climbing: $165 million at $2.3 billion in 2022, $200 million at $2.7 billion in 2023, and $1.5 billion at $12.7 billion in March 2026. Revenue has not been published.
Tseng's own account is of a man who was told no at a point he cared about most, cried, and went on to build a company out of the work he did get.