Andy Lowery
SUMMARY KEYWORDS:
Counter-UAS, High-Powered Microwave (HPM), Directed Energy, Drone Threat
Defense Innovation, Talent Acquisition, Policy and Regulation, International Collaboration, Hardware- Focused Startups, Mid-Tier Acquisition
SPEAKERS:
Lauren Bedula, Andy Lowery, Hondo Geurts
Lauren Bedula 0:00
Welcome back to building the base. Lauren Bedula and Hondo Geurts here recording live from the Reagan National Defense forum in Simi Valley. Lots of energy out here around defense tech modernization, and we're excited to have with us, Andy Lowery, the CEO of Epirus, a counter UAS high power microwave system that is partner of DoDs. We're going to get into some of that. Andy has a very interesting background in the defense industrial base, including from a technical perspective. So we're going to pick his brain on a lot of things. Andy, thanks so much for joining us today.
Andy Lowery 0:27
Very welcome. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Hondo Geurts 0:30
Well, Andy, give our listeners a little bit of a sense of you know what it takes to become the CEO of Epirus. Where'd you grow up? What was your kind of origin story to get here?
Andy Lowery 0:40
Planned it all out from the very beginning. It was chaos that led me here, I think. But it seemed towards the end, all the curtains parted, and I feel like it's destined to be, I think. And so I'll tell you. I started as an enlisted man in the Navy. I started as a nuke ET. I was a reactor operator. I got a commissioning program. I came from very humble beginnings. You know, my father couldn't afford to send me to college, so I went the route a lot of us do, and the military provides, what a wonderful opportunity for people to come from small towns and other places and make a career and really look at me now type of a thing. And so I spent about 10, 11, years active service. My last job, reactor, electrical assistant on board the John C. Stennis on aircraft carriers. And then I went into my civil career. And I started in corporate. I did big corporate. I did Raytheon for better part of a decade. I did one of their fancy chief engineers. I was part of next generation jammer, one of the greatest programs I ever worked on in my life, maybe one of my happiest times in my life that I could just engineer and architect something so sophisticated and so incredible. And it's now just, just now, getting out to the fleet. Now, remember I was Raytheon 2013 so we may talk a little bit about that. And now, finally, they're getting deployed in 2023, and that was a full up, you know, as big as it gets A-Cat-One type of a program. Well, then I said, All right, this is slow, as a lot of us do. I've got more of an appetite for risk. Let me do startups. And at that time, there was no adaptive acquisition framework. There was nothing like we have today. And I went, there's no startup opportunities in defense, unless they want to be maybe a lifestyle business, super contractor, maybe that. But that wasn't interesting to me. So I took a turn and went into kind of Silicon Valley, and ended up in augmented reality and virtual reality and consumer and computer perception and all of these things that you see an autonomy, autonomous vehicles, drones, all of that has everything to do with this idea of big data, and, more importantly, computer perception. Where am I? What's around me? How do I navigate? That's all about autonomy. So I learned tons and tons about that in a better part of a decade, and then I was very successful at RealWear. The company was off and running, going well. I did a change of CEO to get a public facing CEO there, and I was off a little bit, doing not much of anything. And I had an old I called Padawan named Dr Bo Marr, who had founded this little company called Epirus that they somehow got Mark Esper to sit on the board of directors. His first job. I went, what is going on? And he called me out of the blue and said, Hey, old you know, Master Jedi, we need your help. We've invented something incredible here, really incredible. We've built force fields, he said. I said, what? I go. He's not kidding. Come check it out. And I came in, I saw the facility, and immediately said, This is what I've been doing for 30 years. This is the job I've been training for for 30 years. So I joined three years ago as the Chief Product Officer. Did a year of redesigning with the team the system. Did a year of Chief Operating Officer where Ken and I, Ken Bedingfield, now at L3Harris was the CEO, and he and I cleaned up the company a lot that year, and then 2024 I've been CEO the whole year, and I just went over one year on December 5, and it's been a rocket ride. I mean, we're launching this year. It's really been incredible.
Lauren Bedula 4:12
Wow, congratulations on the year. And it sounds like there's been a lot of progress, but also this past year has highlighted the importance of counter UAS. And so can you, from that perspective, talk a little bit about the directed energy world and how HPM fits into that? Or, for our non technical listeners, if you could help, like me, to dumb it down?
Andy Lowery 4:32
Yeah, sure. No, no problem. It's at a high level. Everything is simple, if you just go high enough, you can simplify everything. So if you're looking at our big problem today, it has something to do, what they called with the short range air defense. Picture the short range, not overall air defense. We still do pretty well in that category, but short range, we're starting to be plagued by these nuisances. We call them nuisances, but they're not nuisances. There is a real war fighting vector now called drones. And when we talk about short range air, we're talking about a 10 kilometer radius and a 6000 foot AGL ceiling. So that's the cylinder that we're communicating about. Now within that cylinder there are layers. There are many things that the DoD uses to implement safety and defense. Some are like rockets or missiles or those types of things. Some things are like lasers and very kind of spectacular, how they are visible, and people see the laser, shoot and melt these different things and everything else. But there's another category called high powered microwave. And high powered microwave is really just to make it as simple as you possibly can. Everybody's seen science fiction films where they've got force fields that sit out there and zap things. Now this is very similar. It doesn't physically zap it like a force field might do. It doesn't bounce off the microwaves, but what the microwaves do is they surround the electronics. And whilst surrounding the electronics deliver kind of a smart electromagnetic pulse effect. And that electromagnetic pulse just ceases the electronics to be able to work or to be able to operate. And when you're a drone and you can't spin your propellers, you come tumbling down when you're a drone and you have a fixed wing and you can't move your ailerons, you go spinning out of control and hit the ground. And so we've sold four of these systems. The Army's had them for over 15 months. They've tested them every which way. They've tested them on any kind of target that you can possibly get your hands on, and they've not ever fit my systems. Our systems at Epirus have never failed, have never failed to take out the targets. And so now we're talking about where to go with them. You know, CONUS, OCONUS. How to get them to OCONUS? How do they participate in the layers? And where do they participate in the layers? So we're getting to very specifics about con-ops and doctrine, and how to employ these things in the greater war as we continue to go forward.
Hondo Geurts 7:06
Andy, do you see? I mean, I think, you know, our Trinity, you've seen the Red Sea, kind of we have this scaling problem of, you know, cheap drone takes $3 million Standard Missile to take it out. We've been six months away from lasers and HPM for like 30 years now. Do you sense we're finally at that tipping point where threat and technology and policy and urgency are all kind of aligned to kind of move us into this next generation of defensive weapons?
Andy Lowery 7:40
I think so. And even more specific to kind of foot stomp or whatever it is on Epirus. On Epirus, what we did was very ingenious, in a way, because we've taken a very mature TRL level nine technology, which is a phased array transmitter, I mean, spy six radars, phased array gallium nitride transmitters, next generation jammer system I know a lot about, it was my one of my babies, back in the day when I architected phased array gallium nitride antennas. So this is a very mature we know how to operate it in all kinds of conditions, in the forests, and the buildings and the jungles and the deserts. It works in all kinds of corner conditions. So we don't have any of that Herculean effort like we do with lasers to kind of get over. We have something that's very mature in its nature. We've just used it on other types of applications. We've never used it in a directed energy application. So in one sense, you've got a TRL level nine technology coming to the field, very mature, very good, but then it's being used for a brand new application. So now we still need to test it up through that's why we're going to CENTCOM. That's why we're going to INDOPACOM to do that tier level seven and even eight type testing that we'll do out there in the field. And then we'll be kind of that much more sure of ourselves, that when we go to the program of record and we're shipping hundreds of these things all over the world, that people will know that these things will truly work as great force fields in sort of the layered defense of short range air defense.
Hondo Geurts 9:12
Yeah, I think the other thing that's interesting is the approach, right? This was a much more, probably the first, what you might call a Silicon Valley venture capital hardware based activity, right? Not nothing you know, not Palantir or software kind of driven. But actually, what are the things that have been challenging from approaching hardware on a venture backed endeavor that maybe are different than software that other folks have experienced?
Andy Lowery 9:45
That's a great question, and I'll even kind of take it a little bit further, because you do see some companies up and emerging, like our brothers, Anduril, great, great, great company, and they have lots of hardware, but their hardware a lot of time is dual use. That means. What does that mean? That means they can sell it to a commercial company, like a, you know, like a foreign company, or any kind of commercial company, and then they can also sell it to the military. So when the military buys it, they buy it like a commercial off the shelf product. They buy a laptop or anything like that. We are building a category 18 Weapon System commercially weird, very, very weird, very, very unique. But we present a absolutely poster child for the mid tier acquisition process. I mean, we are poster child for it because it is a development effort. We do have to neck down and actually get to requirements, suitability requirements, how big do you want it? How much range Do you want it? Do? And we can't afford, from a time perspective, to go all the way back in time and do analysis of alternatives. Milestone a, milestone B, milestone C. I mean, you just don't have the 10, 11, years that they had with Next Generation Jammer. So MTA was built for this exact moment. And so I'm happy to say that I'm very, very proud and very, very look up to General Rasch, who runs the RCCTO, the Army, rapid capabilities and critical technology office. General Rasch has been my true partner. We have been truly partners. Soldiers have been embedded every day with our engineers at Epirus. They do call them soldier touch points that we've been running with them alongside, almost like in a product, like company manner, where we're surveying, we're not taking direct, like written, hard requirements. We're saying, what in general, do you like? What don't you like? And we're building the weapon system like a product, and we'll see. So it's an experiment, probably one of a few that's been in this sort of a way. But so far, so good. So far, everyone is saying great things and really, really happy with the way things are going.
Lauren Bedula 11:46
It's awesome. And we love to highlight those stories or entities that have been great partners to field technology from that pilot, initial R and D phase to production. Can you talk a little bit about how Epirus did that from day one? Do you know, is it a conversation, or how did that come about?
Andy Lowery 12:04
Well, it was interesting, because if you look at Next Generation Jammer, it had a very similar architecture to the architecture of Leonidas, similar, not the same at all. And it was a different application, but similar. So the folks that worked with me on Next Generation Jammer, Dr. Bo Marr, Nathan Mintz, several others that were there at the founding days, got together with Joe Lonsdale, and Joe had come to them as 8VC leader, wealthy man was very patriotic, wanting to find other opportunities to get into this neoprime defense tech market. He asked Nathan, he asked Bo what have you run up against that, you've gotten a wall, got in a not invented here, and they said, you know, there is something, it's called directed energy. And there's this group of people, I'm not going to, you know, say who they are, because I don't want to put anybody under the bus. But who won't listen to what we call narrow band directed energy. They think wide band directed energy is the only way. And this is circa kind of the Thor system and other systems like that, and they just had that myopic view. So this was the perfect chance to do what we talk about, neoprime so well as to say, let's try it. Let's make an experiment and bring it to the DoD and say, does it work? And it did, and it was a success. We went to JCO, we competed with six other companies, and they awarded us an initial kind of contract to buy, try decide, and now we've bought. They've tried and tried and tried, and the seeming the decision to be moving forward with us. So we're going out to the field, two to CENTCOM, two to INDOPACOM. Going to go into real zones with the systems. And coming out of that, we should see, hopefully, a lot of systems on order going on going forward.
Lauren Bedula 13:46
Awesome. You've talked about just some of the dynamics with this not being a dual use company, and how that can be challenging right now, at least primarily focusing on the US government as the buyer or public sectors across the world, perhaps. And you mentioned one of your investors through 8VC. What has that been like from, you know, leading this company from a fundraising perspective? How do investors react to this business model?
Andy Lowery 14:11
Well, they love it. They love it, but, but it is hard to get their head around it right, because it's a new market, right? I mean, drones are not a new market. We're buying drones selling drones. That's a market that's kind of been established. So you can get into an established market, sometimes a little easier with some good competitive advantages than you can establish in a new market. And that takes a while, but the DoD is really, really good at it when they set their mind to it, aka MRAPs and the whole IED problem, they can take a market and make it overnight. And I think what we're going to see, and I was with Secretary Austin and some others here at the Reagan, and there's a new counter UAS strategy that I was privileged enough to get to read in the last couple of days. And I'm here to say that this is going. Going the direction of a five alarm fire, that we're really, really going to have to go in the same way that we went with the MRAPs and all of that. If we're going to want to get ahead of it, and we're slowly, kind of trailing behind, it's time to take some aggressive and I think, bold and risky steps into deploying these things and saying it's okay, FAA. It's okay, FCC, we're going to take care of everything, and not make any damage to any collaterals, but we're going to take care of these drones that are a real big problem,
Hondo Geurts 15:27
Yeah, and it's, I mean, a problem for not just the US all our allies and partners. I'm sure you've had lots of fun experience with the throes of export control and dealing with that. How has that journey been and do you think we're now at the point where we can get really mission focused and not so risk averse, and when we talk about sharing technology with trusted partners.
Andy Lowery 15:56
I think you know one is, is, you know, some of the comments around that strategy does even talk to that, you know, talks to like, hey, we need to get better and bolder and more aggressive of with our partners, partnering on these new technologies in order to kind of keep that agility and speed. We can't go through a 10 year process, then another 10 year process to send NGJ to the Australians or something like that. So we worked in 2024 and we had two major wins. And this is, again, I credit everyone. Dr Peterkin was a major part of that, who ran the directed energy group in the Pentagon. He was a major part of helping us with this. But we changed a policy called the National Disclosure Policy One, NDP One, who restricted us completely from even taking in and like any license, any request, we had no options to export. Now that policy was written in 1980 something or 1990 and finally was updated in 2024 so that was a big relief valve that went off. The second major relief valve for us in the international Lane has been AUKUS. And AUKUS is for the Australia and the UK, where we can move much quicker and share technical data much faster with Australia and UK. And in the AUKUS, pillar two, directed energy language was written. So now I can work with that, and I'm working with companies like Drone Shield and others in Australia in order to kind of bring them up and start to partner with some of their great capabilities that they're bringing to bear, so we're just making progress. But I think the important part, I think sorry about that, I think the important part to know about all of this is that this is not a DoD only problem. I think that's what you're alluding to. It's like stadiums are going to be at risk. Borders are at risk. You know, every month how many drones come across our southern border. 8000. 8000 drones a month with guns and drugs. They're not running them across the border. They're flying drones across the border. And today we do nothing. We watch them go, even if we see them coming by, they just fly right across the border. Put a force field on the border, knock them down, collect them, see what they're doing. I mean, it seems so simple. It's common sensical, and Langley the same thing. I'll do this for free, guys, you know? I mean, we've got to put force fields up at Langley and see who's flying these weird triangle shaped things and all this stuff that I read about in the news.
Lauren Bedula 15:57
You talked about the great progress on the policy side over the past year, if you were to have the same progress over the next year to enable some of this, what do you need?
Andy Lowery 18:26
I think it's authority to operate. What right where we got to in this conversation. It's FAA, FCC, it's willingness to take risks. It's willing to try things out and say we're going to be okay with that, because in the ultimate on the other side of us doing that risk is defensive measures like none we've ever seen before. So we have to take that risk and have to move ahead. We can't wait for a tragedy. And by the way, the DoD had their tragedy with tower 22 already, we don't want a domestic tragedy that then spurs us to motion and spurs us to action. So not only do we have to work continually with the DOD, like we're doing, and that's actually going pretty well, and it's going pretty well with the international these days, but with domestic and civil and border. I don't even right now know the pathway we're kind of lost it to what the ultimate pathway should be.
Hondo Geurts 19:18
Again, back to this kind of but a lot of the theme of the Reagan is, how do we bring the full capacity of the country to bear for national security, national prosperity? Lessons learned you've had, if you were to start another, I would say hardware based or single use versus dual use company with the DoD things you would tell your partner or somebody else who is going to try to do Epirus 2.0 or some other, like company.
Andy Lowery 19:47
It's a great question. I would say one thing you need is you need a version or an amount of every function. The major primes have. You need GA/GR and sitting here with us out to the side is my head of GA/GR, Hanz Heinrichs. You need marketing and comms. You need sales. You need engineering, of course, but we built our company almost like one program office at Raytheon or one program office at Northrop Grumman. And that's worked for us, because then I can scale that. I can just rinse and repeat as we get more and more activity. Other companies will have different models. Some will be commercial. Some will be commercial off the shelf, but whatever the model it is that you're going for, like, if you know you're going to need a top secret clearance at six people, I would start working a strategy on how to get a top secret FCL, because, trust me, I'm just now in the process of getting ours after five, six years, whatever it's been, it is no easy feat. People will say, all day long. DD254 TS, I can get you one. I can get you one. Yeah, a 254 is easy, but not an FCL for an entire facility to accept the 254. That's a very clear facility clearance. Yes, yes, yes, sir. Sorry. Thank you for that acronym.
Lauren Bedula 21:05
So on that. What are you seeing just as you're building this team on the talent side? Are people hungry to work on these issues, or is it hard to find folks?
Andy Lowery 21:12
No, I think there's a great kind of spring of engineers that are recognizing Epirus, Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir and many, many others, you know, ShieldAI, ScaleAI I could, you know, Hidden Level. Hidden level is a great company run by a man named Jeff Cole. I can't tell you, good praises enough. And then some of our brother and sister companies like Saronic and Chaos and others like that in the 8VC portfolio. So we are blessed to have basically almost a community or almost a prime. And sometimes it's a little funny, because like in a prime, you'll trade good talent between programs a lot of times, at a rate, you see a lot of people moving from our company to Chaos or or Anduril back to over to us, or us out to Anduril. So there's been begun like a development of a pool, a pool of people that don't want to be in big Navy, aka the prime they want to be pirates, you know, they want to have a little bit more fun, a little more action. And I think engineers that are looking to get into some of the hardest, most incredible engineering that you can possibly do. And I've done it all. I've done big NGJ systems. I've done heads up displays, I've done computer type systems and all of it. And I would say the best and most fun engineering I've ever done is doing engineering in aerospace and defense. You are really coming with the state of the art people and working with the greatest people. Now, the one caveat I'd say to that is a company like Epirus makes it a lot more fun than doing that same job in Raytheon. Not that I didn't have a good time in Raytheon. I loved my time as a chief engineer at Raytheon, but this time is even better. Like this is even more fun.
Lauren Bedula 22:54
So awesome. What a great call to action to our listeners, or folks who are looking into getting into these fields. Andy, we know you have a very busy day. Thanks for spending some time with us and sharing these insights.
Andy Lowery 23:04
Great. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai