Venture firm General Catalyst is leading a $50 million funding round into Onebrief, a startup that makes collaboration software to help Pentagon leaders speed-up military planning, just months after raising a $30 million series B in August.

The funding for Hawaii-based Onebrief, a series C round, will value the company at $650 million, CEO and cofounder Grant Demaree told Forbes. Its collaboration tools for soldiers and military planners, which shares similarities with Atlassian’s Jira project management suite, are currently used across all military networks, up to top secret level.

“We have to modernize our national defense,” said Paul Kwan, a managing director at General Catalyst, who has led investments in multiple defense tech companies. “There’s not a lot of people doing this part of the puzzle.” General Catalyst co-led the round with Insight Partners. Human Capital, Caffeinated Capital and 9Yards Capital also participated.

In addition, the company announced that Chris Miller, a former acting Secretary of Defense and co-author of Project 2025, has joined its board. In the conservative blueprint for Trump’s presidential transition, Miller wrote that the DoD is “a deeply troubled institution” and needed to implement technology reforms. He told Forbes he sees Onebrief’s software as a way to streamline the Pentagon’s decision-making and introduce a common operating system. “The goal is this becomes the standard,” Miller said. “That’s the argument I’m making to these [Pentagon] folks.”

Miller acknowledged his board role provides a link to the Trump administration ahead of what Silicon Valley hopes will be a bumper year for startups making software, weapons and energy solutions for the Pentagon. “I’m pretty active and in the corridors,” he said, adding that Onebrief could also be helpful to Elon Musk and his government efficiency effort DOGE. “That’s the idea, feed into DOGE,” he said. “I really think it’ll be self explanatory.”

For years, commanders drew up elaborate mission plans on hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Powerpoint slides. If an official ordered a change to the plan, teams of people would manually update slides to reflect the new changes, a process that could take weeks, said Miller, who joined the U.S. Army in the 1980s. After demoing Onebrief’s tools, he saw a potential solution. “I met Grant, he went through the thing, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, he solved this problem.’”

Instead of staff needing to manually update Powerpoint slides, Onebrief’s tools can auto-populate changes made to military plans, across multiple teams, Demaree said. During one recent exercise, a Pentagon unit that he declined to name was attempting to update a military plan that he claimed would have previously taken several weeks. “They fully redid it in less than three hours,” he said.

Demaree, who was a captain in the U.S. Army and saw such drudgery firsthand, cofounded Onebrief in 2019, getting some traction after convincing lower-rung officers that his product could automate updates to the vast planning process. While the uptick was initially slow — Onebrief was a two-person team in its initial years, and tried to generate business by sending LinkedIn cold-messages to majors and colonels who oversaw military planning — it went through YCombinator in 2021, and then raised a seed round soon after. In August of last year, the company closed its $30 million series B, led by Human Capital (it has raised $100 million total).

Demaree declined to provide revenue or growth figures. He claimed the company, which employs almost 150 people, is “just shy of profitable.” Onebrief’s tools are currently used by all five major Pentagon combatant commands, he said, which cover designated geographic regions of the world, such as Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command.

Onebrief is the latest defense tech investment for General Catalyst, which has been building a portfolio of startups securing military contracts, including Anduril, European defense software unicorn Helsing AI and intelligence software startup Vannevar Labs. Last month, it bolstered its D.C. lobbying efforts, and said it was funding a manufacturing and defense focused group, the New American Industrial Alliance, alongside Palantir and venture fund 8VC. “If you want to transform physical industry, you gotta sit at the nexus of capital, innovation and policy,” Kwan told Forbes at the time.

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