February is AI and Data month on The Dawn of Autonomy podcast, and we’re kicking it off with our sponsor, VICTUS Technologies.
This episode features Jesse Hamel, Founder and CEO of VICTUS Technologies, building Contested Autonomy for contested environments. Jesse is a retired AC-130 gunship aviator, former U.S. Air Force weapons officer, SOCOM drone squadron commander, and MIT graduate—bringing direct operational experience to the design of autonomous systems meant to survive real conflict and real uncertainty.
VICTUS focuses on the hardest autonomy problem: enabling systems to operate in the clouds, over water, and under GPS jamming and spoofing, where vision degrades, communications fail, and legacy autonomy architectures collapse. Their platform is built around resilient onboard intelligence, machine learning state estimation, and navigation designed for degraded and denied conditions—not ideal ones.
In this conversation, Jesse explains why contested environments are the defining constraint for modern autonomy, how operational realities shape system design, and what it takes to build autonomous capability that remains reliable when infrastructure, signals, and assumptions break down.
