Company valuations and round sizes come from 2026 press coverage of funding announcements (Fast Company, Citybiz, New Market Pitch, Value Add VC's defense tracker, Gunderson Dettmer's Anduril Series H notice). The "60+" figure is Value Add VC's count of defense startups raising $10M or more in 2025–26; the tracker does not publish the full list, so this map names 44.

Money figures on company and fund pages were researched separately on September 12, 2026. "Raised" is total capital raised to date and can include debt where a company reported it that way; "valued at" is the most recent disclosed post-money valuation, or market cap for public companies as of the date shown. Where a company disclosed only a floor ("over $1B"), the floor is used. Fund sizes are assets under management as the firm or a primary source reported them; Accel publishes none, and Valor's regulatory filing shows a far larger gross figure than its own $17.5B. Every figure links to its source. Several tags were updated in this pass where 2026 rounds had moved the numbers: Saronic, Mach, Castelion, Chaos, Hermeus, and Epirus among them.

Company-to-fund links are drawn solid where the fund was a named lead or co-lead in a round announcement, and dashed ("participant") where the fund is named in the round but did not lead. Every link has a source. On September 13, 2026 the 21 companies with no fund attached were checked against all 14 funds; that pass added links for Anthropic, Slingshot, Vatn, HavocAI, Second Front, Defense Unicorns, Govini, Epsilon3, Rocket Lab, and Joby, and confirmed that the remaining eleven have no named backer on this map. Three of the funds that lead those companies' rounds were then added to the map, Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, Eclipse, and Moore Strategic Ventures, which connected seven of them. The rest sit under their own heading in the graph, and every company page lists who actually leads its rounds. No link means no prominent fund on this map is publicly attached, not that the company is unfunded.

Bios were drafted from public reporting and then checked against news coverage on September 11, 2026. Five items were corrected in that pass: Howery's confirmation and start dates; Gracias's DOGE role and its scope-of-access questions; the Maguire episode, which was a founder petition, not a letter from Sequoia's founders; Botha's November 2025 exit and the Lin–Grady succession; and Sacks's March 2026 departure from the czar role and move to PCAST. Government roles change; treat any "current" title as of that date.

The "Whose money is it" page covers the largest state-level public pension fund in each of the 50 states, researched on September 13, 2026: its size, the public-records law it answers to, and the contact it publishes for records requests. Where a fund publishes no records contact, the page gives its general address and says so. Twenty-seven of the fifty already publish a list of their private-equity commitments, and the page links to it. Six states, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, limit requests to their own residents, checked against each statute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press guides on September 13, 2026; the page flags them. Contact details drift; if one fails, the fund's main site will list the current officer.

None of the funds here publish their limited partners, but state pension funds publish their side. The What the pensions hold page lists every documented stake, drawn from the pension funds' own partnership lists and from records produced in answer to our requests, each with its source and date. Pensions are only part of the picture: endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, and family offices disclose far less, and money a pension routes through a fund of funds does not show up in its own lists. A pension's stake is in a fund's whole portfolio, so it links that pension to every company the fund backs without meaning the pension chose any one of them.

Found an error, a missing link, or a document that belongs here? Write to moderatelyhopeful@proton.me.