The battery startup powering the laser-weapons race
This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. Adam Warmoth is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, a San Francisco-based start-up building battlefield power systems to bridge expeditionary forces’ energy gap at the tactical edge. The company’s Amphora battery system provides modular voltage and low-signature power for everything from radios and drones to sensors and directed energy systems. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did you end up here? Was there an “aha!” moment for you where a light bulb went off over your head? What was the genesis of Chariot Defense? It was almost exactly two years ago, at SOF Week 2024, that I had this light bulb moment. I realized that the core commercial technology around high voltage batteries and silicon carbide power electronics that I had been working with and getting exposed to at Archer, Uber Elevate, and Kitty Hawk, and what was coming out of companies like Tesla and Rivian—there was this incredible breakthrough driven by the electric vehicle and electric aircraft industries, and the technology just wasn’t making its way into defense. Half of my career was spent on electric aircraft, and the other half was spent at Anduril, where I was a program manager for counter-drone systems and air defense systems. We were deploying counter-drone systems into contested expeditionary environments, and one of the biggest problems we had was that these passive systems needed a high active draw when making an intercept. Our solution was these big diesel generators that we ran inefficiently 24/7, created a targetable signature, and had serious reliability issues. There was no product available that could solve these problems that could actually deploy in a military environment, had a secure non-Chinese supply chain, and was designed to be interoperable with all the US military’s existing equipment around power generation