Venture Capital Defense Tech Investing: Early Innings or a Bubble in the Making?

Steven Chin

US Pension Manager ABB

Moderator, Steven Chin has been at ABB as a plan sponsor since 2008. Prior to that Steven was the quasi-CIO at MMBB from 2000-2008. Steven holds an MBA in Finance from Fuqua.

Scott Robertson

Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Dauntless Ventures

Scott Robertson is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Dauntless Ventures, a critical technology fund backed by the Department of Defense and the SBA as part of the Critical Technology Initiative. Dauntless invests in technologies that have a meaningful role to play in national security and economic resilience. 

 He is a former US Navy Super Hornet pilot and TOPGUN graduate, after which he has had a career building fast growing startups including as an early team member at Ginkgo Biosecurity, the Chief Commercial Officer at Solugen and a co-founder of Lila Sciences. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy, Harvard Business School, and UC Berkeley.

Kevin Decker

Chief Executive Officer

Kevin Decker has been the Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Aero since September, 2020. Bringing 20+ years of leadership experience across a wide range of companies in dozens of cultures and countries, he has a strong track record of building commercial teams, tailoring customer specific value propositions, and managing diverse groups of resources from front line sales associates to in-field application engineers and program managers.

Prior to joining Ocean Aero, Decker was most recently the Chief Commercial Officer of Emulate, Inc., a biotech start-up producing and servicing organs-on-chips technology for use in pharmaceutical drug discovery and personal medicine, with the company’s technology being spun out of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Before Emulate, Decker was with Rexnord Industries where he served as the leader of the Rexnord Business System’s Corporate commercial team.

Decker served for 16 years at General Electric (GE) in multiple business units and held a range of management positions at GE Corporate, GE Distributed Power and GE Measurement & Controls, where he developed global sales pipelines, cultivated cross-company customer pursuit teams, and championed the principles of Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) across the portfolio while leading market development and commercial operations teams.

Earlier in his career, Decker spent 7 years in GE’s leadership training program in the finance and audit group, obtained a Six Sigma black belt certification, and received his undergraduate degree in business administration from Boston University.

Kirsten Bartok Touw

Co-Founder and Managing Partner of New Vista Capital

Kirsten Bartok Touw is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of New Vista Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing in space, national security, physical AI and defense technologies. The firm brings together partners with deep experience across the industrial base, the Department of Defense, national security and deep program and engineering experience, providing founders with a uniquely informed perspective and access to a highly connected ecosystem across government, industry, and venture capital.

In addition to her venture work, Bartok Touw has been active in U.S. national security and technology policy. She has served as a Senior Advisor to the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital, on the U.S. EXIM Bank’s Council on China Competition and Transformational Technologies, and on the advisory board of Silicon Valley Defense Group. She is also a member of Business Executives for National Security (BENS).

Prior to founding New Vista Capital, Bartok Touw co-founded and built AirFinance, a credit lender in the global aerospace, space, and defense companies. Earlier in her career she served as Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Hawker Beechcraft Corporation, where she led strategic initiatives including the company’s expansion into Asia and development of its China operations.

She was also a co-founder, board member, and CFO of XOJET, a TPG-backed business jet fleet operator that later combined with VistaJet to form the world’s largest global business jet operator.

Earlier in her career, Bartok Touw spent more than a decade in private equity and venture capital at Hambrecht & Quist, JPMorgan Partners / Chase Capital (all the same firm built via M&A), and Alpine Investors. She began her career in investment banking and capital markets at Goldman Sachs.

She currently serves on the boards of the next generation STOL aircraft company, Electra.aero and the global FBO, Atlantic Aviation. She previously served on the advisory council of the National Business Aviation Association and the Stanford Graduate School of Business Management Board.

Bartok Touw holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, and an MBA from Stanford University. She was also a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member, a French-American Foundation Young Leader, a Committee on U.S.–China Relations Young Leaders Fellow, and a German Marshall Fellow.

She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and their three children.