Deterrence co-founder Dhruva Rajendra on building robots that manufacture munitions to close the US-China gap

Summary

Deterrence is a year-old startup building robots that manufacture energetic materials — explosives, propellants, and primers — with the stated mission of closing the US munitions gap against China and other near-peer adversaries. Co-founder Dhruva Rajendra started the company with Brian, his co-founder from a prior hardware company called Latch, and Henry, a former Tesla engineer with factory-building experience.

The gap Deterrence is targeting is not theoretical. When Rajendra toured US munitions facilities, he found machinery dating to the 1930s and 1940s, safety protocols that haven't been updated to modern standards, and a multigenerational workforce still running the same equipment their grandparents used. Roughly every two to three months, an explosion somewhere in the supply chain kills someone. Team members who came from EV battery manufacturing at Tesla and Rivian — environments where walking into the wrong room without PPE can be fatal — were struck by how casually some munitions facilities operate.

The product

Deterrence is starting with primers for small-caliber rifle rounds. A standard bullet has four components: the brass casing, the projectile, gunpowder, and the primer. The primer sits at the back of the casing; when the firing pin strikes it, it creates a small explosion that ignites the gunpowder and fires the round. Rajendra describes the current manufacturing process as mixing chemical precursors into a doughy material, which workers then manually rub onto primer cups at application stations — wet floors, rubber boots, rubber gloves — before a pressing step and manual quality inspection. Deterrence is automating that process with robotics and replacing human visual QA with computer vision.

Market size

The Army spends roughly $30 billion on munitions annually; the Air Force's figure is higher. Rajendra estimates energetics represent 20–30% of that spend. He notes that even sub-components command large contracts — the adhesive alone on a 155mm artillery shell can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The pitch to engineers is the intersection of AI, robotics, and chemistry. Much of the underlying chemistry is decades old and poorly understood outside a small group of specialists, which is partly why resistance to change is so entrenched — a single wrong adjustment, Rajendra says, can cost someone their eyebrows or their fingers.

Navigating Washington

Deterrence is based in the DC area, and Rajendra argues smaller defense startups should spend real time there rather than flying in for a week. Information moves fast, perspectives shift meeting to meeting, and many program offices still have unspent dollars that are genuinely available. His advice to other founders: go directly to program offices rather than through lobbyists, because no one tells the story better than the founder. The current reconciliation process on the Hill has four or five published defense priorities that Rajendra says align well with what defense startups are building.

The new administration has filled senior positions but left many lower-level seats empty, which Rajendra sees as an opening — early-stage founders can help shape the thinking of incoming under-secretaries before those officials fully settle into their roles. His framing is that Washington's current instability is an accelerant for startups willing to engage directly.