Shield Capital adds former Defense Innovation Unit leader

Shield Capital, a venture investment firm focused on finding and backing companies with dual-use technologies, has added former Defense Innovation Unit leader Michael Brown to the leadership group.

He is of two new additions to Shield's team of venture partners announced Tuesday. The second is John Jack, a former chief executive of Covalent who led its sales respectively to VMware and the former Hewlett Packard.

Brown worked for the past four years as director of DIU, the Defense Department's main interface for accelerating the adoption of commercial technologies that can be scaled for military and other national security missions.

Also a former CEO of Symantec and Quantum Corp., Brown departed DIU in September and has since taken on a visiting scholar position at the Hoover Institution. He also will join the Center for a New American Security’s board of advisers next year.

This new role at Shield will see Brown work with another former head of DIU in Raj Shah, one of two managing directors at the firm alongside veteran tech investor Philip Bilden.

L3Harris Technologies partners with Shield on the latter's mission to identify and invest in emerging technology companies whose creations in commercial markets can also be deployed for defense missions.

In an early October interview at the AUSA Conference, L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik told us the company has co-invested "a couple million dollars" in two of the four Shield has decided to financially back. Shield altogether has decided to invest in four companies since it finalized the partnership with L3Harris.