It was 2021, and John Goodson faced an inflection point in his career.
He had spent the last two and a half years at CTI, a small software and systems development company that provides technologies for the U.S. military. Goodson had worn many hats in his time there, learning the arcane ins and outs of the defense contracting business.
When the company sought a private equity partner to provide the capital necessary for major growth, Goodson and a colleague, Steve Turner, had to make a decision: stay and grow, or strike out on their own.
At that point, Goodson said, “Steve and I had worked on just about every type of program or project you can work on in the Department of Defense, from systems integration on crewed aircraft, uncrewed systems, application development [of] both mobile and web-based apps, data processing and machine learning.”
They left CTI, but without a clear idea of what problem they wanted to tackle. Goodson found that by returning to San Diego, where he had separated from the U.S. Navy in 2016. At the time, he had been working in a unit that provides support to the Navy’s West Coast SEAL team.
He and Turner sought to uncover the SEAL team’s biggest pain points, whether processes or tools, and eventually landed on a problem Goodson had experienced firsthand in Southern Afghanistan — working with large and unwieldy drones.
Today, Goodson is CEO and Turner is the chief technical officer of San Antonio-based Darkhive, which is developing a small, inexpensive autonomous drone for military and public safety use. The company also has expanded into related software development.
On Tuesday, Goodson hosted a panel at San Antonio Startup Week on how to get a defense tech startup going, just a week after Darkhive announced it had been awarded a $1.25 million contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to advance a voice-enabled command and control system for smartphone-based technology used by the military for tactical information feeds, various analytics and visualizations.
Last month, Darkhive secured four additional contracts worth almost $5 million with AFWERX, part of the Air Force Research Lab, to develop “resilient, low-cost autonomous drone swarming technologies.”
The contracts were awarded through a pair of federal programs — Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) — designed to encourage small U. S. businesses to engage in research that has the potential for commercialization.
All told, Darkhive has scored more than $13 million in government contracts, which in turn helped spur $4 million in recent seed-round funding from investors.
Goodson emphasized the value of the SBIR/STTR grants for startups. Grants for “phase 1” projects, which establish the technical merit, feasibility and commercial potential of the research, are relatively small, he pointed out — generally from $50,000 up to $250,000.
“One of our institutional investors said, ‘I can’t believe you’re so excited about these phase 1 [grants], that’s $75,000, why do you care?’ … But our phase 1 got taken directly to phase 3 — so that was $75K that got turned into $5 million, pretty much overnight.”
He acknowledged that seeking these smaller grants is time-consuming, requiring attention to minutiae and lots of backup documentation, including letters of support from potential customers and investors.
One of Darkhive’s investors is the Capital Factory, which Goodson said he found by googling “resources for startups in Central Texas.”
But Capital Factory doesn’t offer its support to just any startup, said Luis Martinez, senior venture associate with the statewide incubator, which opened a San Antonio office in 2022.
Martinez said Capital Factory seeks companies that already have some traction and are looking for venture capital and institutional investor funding, that are aiming to scale and grow to the IPO stage. Capital Factory stays with a company for its lifetime, Martinez said.
Capital Factory first brought Darkhive into its portfolio, meaning it took a 1% interest in the company in exchange for access to a global network of funders and mentors. Capital Factory connected Darkhive to its Center for Defense Innovation.
“And then in this fundraising round, we saw a great investment opportunity with them and [Capital Factory] became an investor,” Martinez said.
Martinez, a former Trinity University business professor, has also been for the past decade a mentor with Geekdom, which organizes San Antonio Startup Week.
He described an ecosystem here that allows someone with an idea to bring it to Geekdom to flesh it out and learn the basics, “then when they’re ready to grow and scale, when they’ve proven out their business model, they’re ready for Capital Factory to take them to the next stage.”
For Darkhive, that next stage is moving into its first standalone space, a 10,000-square-foot building in the Lone Star District. “It’s a giant warehouse and we’re going to keep it as open as we possibly can, ’cause we gotta do a lot of flight time,” he said.
The company now employs 15 people, he said, six of whom are locating to San Antonio by the beginning of 2024, when he expects the company will be able to move into the warehouse.
Goodson, who moved to San Antonio in 2020, said he had been wanting to get involved in the local startup scene for a while, but felt like he didn’t have enough to offer.
“Now, we’re finally getting to the point where we’ve got enough behind us where it’s like, “OK, cool, I know something about this, and so now we can help the community,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of what I’m doing without some amazing mentors and friends who really put in a lot of time to help us grow.”
