This week, we announced we’ve acquired Battle Road Digital, whose wargaming software is in broad use across the U.S. and allied militaries. We also closed our Series D at a $2.15B post-money valuation.

Wargaming is a critical component of modern command, playing the same role wind tunnels played in the early days of flight.

When the Wright Brothers’ early gliders didn’t work very well, they suspected existing lift and drag tables were wrong. So they built a wooden wind tunnel in their bicycle shop and tested more than 200 airfoils. The Wright Brothers’ data rewrote the world’s aerodynamic tables, which made powered flight possible. By the 1930s, wind tunnels were understood to be crucially important to national infrastructure. No one tried a costly or dangerous flight test without first iterating in a tunnel.

Battle Road gives commanders that same rigor. 

Integrating Battle Road is now a core part of our vision to make military command superhuman. 

We’ll make wargaming fast, easy, and accurate. AI will play autonomously and play itself. In parallel, we’ll integrate Battle Road into the Onebrief platform, until Onebrief users can set up a wargame with one click.

How we chose Battle Road

We looked at a lot of wargaming companies before we talked with Battle Road. We hadn't heard of Battle Road – a quiet startup from Boise, Idaho – until officers serving at a US Combatant Command told us about a new product they were using. One that “actually worked.”

After meeting the CEO and co-founder, Josh Henderson, we set up a joint exercise to find out how our products and teams could work together. Josh, co-founder Brent Elmer, and a group from the Onebrief team spent a few days on a fictional military scenario, planning a response in Onebrief and gaming the plan in Battle Road.

At the exercise, we learned a lot about Battle Road:

1. They built a whole Earth simulation. It’s technically challenging, but no other approach meets the needs of a serious commander. 

It spans the full spectrum: macro issues like domestic production and a detailed logistics model and micro issues like radar detection and individual munition trajectories.

2. The user experience is way ahead of the market. I learned it right away, with almost no instruction.

3. The automation is excellent. Most large scale wargames require hundreds of decisions per turn. That’s how staffs get bogged down. Good automation means a much lower load.
   
   Automation is about making wargaming fast and easy by shrinking its two burdens on the command: set-up and per-turn. We will make both burdens imperceptible.

The US Army selected Battle Road as the core simulation engine of its Next Generation Constructive (NGC) program. This is not common – a seed stage startup as the central performer on a significant program.

To find the very best wargaming company, we talked to users, civil servants, and currently serving 4-stars. Each built our conviction that acquiring Battle Road is right for the customer.

The Series D

We closed our Series D, featuring both a primary and secondary offering for an aggregate $200 million, at a post-money valuation of more than $2 billion.

Battery Ventures and Sapphire Ventures led the round, with new participation from Salesforce Venture and additional investment from General Catalyst and Insight Partners. As always, the most important factor in our choice of investors was their clarity of thought around our growth.

We’re using the funding for three main efforts:

1. Acquire and accelerate Battle Road.
2. Expand agentic AI workflows across the core Onebrief platform.
3. Keep improving our infrastructure to stay live, performant, and secure in great power conflict.

As part of the Series D, we’re making a Tender Offer to our employees. This is the second year we’ve done this. Each employee has the option to sell up to 20% of their vested shares at the full price of the preferred stock. No discount.

Next steps

We’re hiring across all functions, both for the core Onebrief platform and for Battle Road. Within Battle Road’s product, here’s what we’re working on:

1. Invest in gaming coverage of all domains, especially space and cyber.

2. Expand automation until we support AI self-play.

3. Make Battle Road available in the cloud across NIPR, SIPR, JWICS, and coalition networks.
   
   
4. Support users worldwide to earn frequent operational usage.
   
   
5. Fully integrate Battle Road’s product into the Onebrief platform. 

The purpose of our whole team is to make military command superhuman.

Closing thoughts

Startup exits are a special thing, and I’d like to reflect on what Josh, Brent, and their team have accomplished.

They identified a problem that has vexed large companies and governments. Hundreds of millions had already been spent with little to show for it. With no special connections and very little venture money, their small team solved it for the benefit of our country and our allies. Sounds very American.

Congratulations to Battle Road. Welcome to the team!