Shift5 – an onboard data company – announced recently that it raised $33 million in additional financing, bringing the Series B round to $83 million. The round was led by Moore Strategic Ventures and industry stalwarts across defense and commercial aerospace industries including Booz Allen Hamilton’s corporate venture capital arm Booz Allen Ventures and JetBlue Ventures, and Teamworthy Ventures participated in the round, bringing the company’s total venture funding to $108 million.
This round of funding comes amid significant business momentum as over the last year, Shift5 more than doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) and more than doubled its number of customers across the Department of Defense (DoD) and commercial aerospace and rail sectors. Plus the company also grew the rate of its platform deployments on commercial and DoD vehicles and weapon systems by 1,275%.
Fleet assets are known for being composed of thousands of operational technology (OT) components, each emitting valuable data that can be collected and transformed into useful intelligence, but operators have been locked out. And the Shift5 platform unlocks onboard OT data and provides modern observability into onboard assets, enabling commercial operators to increase efficiencies and improve the safety of their fleets while helping Department of Defense (DoD) operators boost fleet readiness, lethality, and survivability.
Over last year, the Shift5 platform processed over 37 billion messages from its deployments, and identified more than 20 billion unique events occurring at the serial bus level. And from these events, Shift5 flagged 1.8 million violations. Among these violations, Shift5 elevated 6 critical alerts that required action and led to three assets moving from a non-compliant to a compliant status.
Shift5 is currently supporting multiple branches and combatant commands of the U.S. military, including the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, and U.S. Special Operations Command. In the last year, Shift5 also:
— Secured a 92% retention rate with in-production customers across the DoD and commercial sectors
— Captured more than 8,500 operational hours from commercial and military fleets and weapon systems
— Increased the size of its deployment in a Fortune 500 commercial airline by 25%
— Achieved its first cross-platform Authority to Operate (ATO) Certification from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
Shift5 is known as the only hardware, serial bus, and protocol-agnostic platform that can perform full-take data capture from the components and data buses onboard fleets and weapon systems as well as real-time edge analytics, enabling mission and operational insights, reduced decision latency, and modern onboard observability. And the funding will fuel the infrastructure supporting Shift5’s rapidly growing commercial and federal businesses as it expands to tackle the challenge of onboard observability and comes a month after Shift5 and JetBlue Airlines announced a partnership to bring cybersecurity and data observability of onboard avionics to commercial aircraft, and the company’s first cross-platform Authority to Operate (ATO) Certification from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), validating the resilience and security of the Shift5 platform.
The extended round caps off operational growth for the company as Shift5 expanded its Arlington-based office footprint and grew its executive team through the appointment of its inaugural General Counsel, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief People Officer.
KEY QUOTES:
“Gaining observability at the onboard OT level can transform not just real-time operations, but the resilience and safety of the commercial and military fleets that underpin national defense and the U.S. economy. The work Shift5 does is foundational – the endless data we capture, add context to, analyze and provide insights around creates a wholly new paradigm for fleet operators and maintainers to make decisions. And in the context of innovations and modern threats, this level of specificity is needed. Our expanded round not only validates the successes of the Shift5 business, but will help us support overall safer, more reliable, and resilient commercial transportation and military fleets.”
— Shift5 CEO and Co-Founder Josh Lospinoso
“Booz Allen and Shift5 will together unlock real value for clients in the civilian, federal and military spaces to detect threats, lower risk vectors, and maintain resilience in a time of heightened competition fueled by emerging technology. The investment by Booz Allen Ventures in Shift5 is just one of our answers to how we can ensure national security, public safety, and economic security, and bolster the country’s readiness and resilience.”
— Travis Bales, managing director at Booz Allen Ventures
