Obviant, a risk intelligence startup founded by Brendan Karp, has raised $7.1 million in funding to reimagine how governments, enterprises, and critical infrastructure operators assess, track, and respond to global threats. The round includes backing from Shield Capital, Motivate Venture Capital, A*, New Vista Capital, Aloft Venture Capital, and Underdog Labs.

In a world increasingly shaped by complex risks - ranging from cyber threats and supply chain fragility to climate volatility and geopolitical instability - Obviant is positioning itself as the operating system for strategic decision-making.

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A New Layer of Intelligence for Real-World Risk

Obviant is building software that bridges the gap between reactive alerts and proactive intelligence. The platform ingests structured and unstructured data - from global news, satellite feeds, and risk signals - and converts it into real-time threat assessments that organizations can use to prioritize action, allocate resources, or de-escalate exposure.

While most systems in this space focus on anomaly detection or retroactive reporting, Obviant introduces decision-layer intelligence - tailored insights based on geography, asset vulnerability, and geopolitical ripple effects. The result isn’t just more data, but higher-quality foresight.

This is where most platforms fall short. Founders tend to build for clarity in low-stakes environments - dashboards that are beautiful, but binary. But high-stakes domains don’t operate in binaries. The most effective systems in defense, infrastructure, or intelligence aren't just fast - they’re built to model ambiguity, to allow decision-makers to hold multiple risk scenarios in tension before acting.

And that’s the ultra value drop: if you’re building in complex decision domains, your job isn’t to remove uncertainty - it’s to make uncertainty actionable. Obviant doesn’t flatten complexity to fit a UI - it reshapes its interface to fit the logic of multi-stakeholder decisions. That’s what makes it credible in war rooms and control centers, not just demo rooms. Founders in adjacent spaces - regtech, medtech, aerospace - should take note: the winning product often isn’t the smartest or most automated. It’s the one that frames the problem the way the operator already thinks about it.

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Backed by Operators Who Know the Landscape

Obviant’s $7.1M round includes a syndicate of experienced investors:

• Shield Capital – investing at the intersection of national security and dual-use tech
  
• Motivate Venture Capital, A*, New Vista Capital – focused on applied AI and enterprise resilience
  
• Aloft Venture Capital and Underdog Labs – backing frontier-stage infrastructure and defense-aligned tech
  

This funding will fuel engineering, hiring, and expansion into strategic government and enterprise pilots.

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The Risk Intelligence Market Is Rebuilding Itself

According to Gartner, spending on enterprise risk management software is expected to surpass $17 billion globally by 2026, with a focus on predictive analytics, AI-assisted response planning, and cross-domain threat modeling. Governments and defense contractors alike are replatforming aging risk frameworks to prepare for emerging categories of instability - like economic coercion, cyber-physical attacks, and autonomous misinformation.

Meanwhile, dual-use technologies (those that serve both military and civilian use cases) are seeing a resurgence in venture capital. In 2023, firms like Shield Capital and Andreesen Horowitz’s American Dynamism made dozens of bets across the defense-AI stack. Obviant stands at the center of this movement - technically sophisticated, but deployable within public-sector workflows.

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A Founder Who Understands Strategic Context

Brendan Karp, CEO and founder, brings a rare mix of policy experience and systems thinking. His background spans roles in public sector modernization and intelligence research, giving him first-hand knowledge of how decision frameworks in complex orgs actually operate.

That understanding shows up in Obviant’s product philosophy. Rather than simplifying risk into static scores, the platform builds adaptive risk surfaces - views that evolve as new data is introduced and which reflect not just threat level, but organizational impact.

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What’s Next for Obviant

With funding secured, Obviant will:

• Expand deployments in energy, defense, and national infrastructure networks
  
• Launch simulation models for disinformation, dislocation, and coordinated threat actors
  
• Deepen integrations with security and risk tools like SIEMs, ERPs, and OT monitoring
  
• Grow its in-house intelligence and geopolitical modeling team
  
• Position the platform as a trusted risk intelligence layer across sovereign and corporate systems
  

In a world increasingly defined by interconnected risk, Obviant is aiming to become the connective tissue between data and decision, for those who can’t afford to be wrong.

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