Dexis Consulting, Shield AI fetch new capital
Gettyimages.com / Javier Ghersi
By
Ross Wilkers
These transactions represent a cross-section of private equity and venture investment activity happening all across public sector.
Dexis Consulting
The professional services provider will receive what it is calling a "growth capital infusion" from CM Equity Partners, an investor in a handful of other companies across the public sector market.
Terms of the investment announced Friday were not disclosed. Dexis will use that new source of capital to support growth initiatives among civilian agencies responsible for programs involving natural disaster recover, public health, climate change, and citizen services enabled by artificial intelligence.
"We can ramp up initiatives to support public sector leaders on even larger social impact programs," said Dexis' founder and chief executive Mihir Desai said in a release. "We are excited to partner with CMEP to continue to build on the brand and legacy that we have built over the past 22 years.”
Desai will continue as CEO and Mark McEuen is staying on as chief operating officer. The entirety of Dexis' board of directors is also remaining in their roles, including the former ICF CEO Sudhakar Kesavan who joined the panel in early 2021.
CM Equity also is an investor in contractors such as A-Tek, BlueStreet Solutions, Janus Research Group, Solerity and an unnamed firm that works in the intelligence community.
Shield AI
The defense technology startup has secured another $100 million in Series F equity and $200 million in debt financing to support its continued development of artificial intelligence software for aircraft.
Hercules Capital provided the debt, while the source of the equity to extend Shield AI's sixth stage of venture funding was not disclosed. Shield AI said Friday that its Series F funding total grows to approximately $500 million with those additions, while the touted valuation also now stands at $2.8 billion.
Shield AI first disclosed the Series F round in October, which saw Cathie Wood's ARK Invest fund become a new backer of the eight-year-old company.
For Shield AI, this new source of capital will go toward the further development and scaling of its V-BAT Teams software that is designed to help one human operator have control of four autonomous aircraft at a time.
The company's other high-profile product called Hivemind works to help enable the full autonomy of systems in the field while being disconnected from cloud computing environments and networks.