This week, the Dawn of Autonomy podcast picks up “Tech Leaders” month, sponsored by TruWeather Solutions, with a deep dive into one of the defining challenges of autonomy at scale. Joining the show is Josh Giegel, CEO of Gambit, the company building the coordination layer that lets heterogeneous autonomous systems respond collectively and adaptively in real time, across domains, in GPS- and comms-denied environments.
Josh Giegel is an entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who has spent his career taking on problems most people would not touch. He went from early SpaceX engineer to co-founding and leading Virgin Hyperloop, one of the most audacious infrastructure bets of the last decade. Now he’s tackling a problem that’s defining the next era of defense tech: making heterogeneous autonomous systems actually work together in the field.
In this episode, Josh will break down the gap Gambit is built to close, a gap that’s playing out right now in Ukraine and beyond: autonomous systems are being fielded at scale, but mostly as individual or pre-coordinated assets. The collective behavior problem remains largely unsolved. In the past 12 to 24 months, the Gambit team has moved fast, earning competitive awards from the Air Force, Army, and SOCOM, and forging strategic partnerships with AWS, L3Harris, RTX, and SNC. With the Pentagon’s proposed FY27 DAWG budget jumping to $54.6 billion from $225 million a year ago, the demand signal is clear, and the harder question isn’t whether we can build autonomous systems. It’s whether we can make them work together.
Tune in to hear how Josh and the Gambit team are thinking about autonomy at scale, what it actually takes to coordinate heterogeneous platforms across domains under degraded comms, and how the strategic and tactical questions around autonomous systems in conflict are still being written.
