CyberWire Daily - Investing in the security tech market with NightDragon. [T-Minus Space Daily Special Edition]

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

While our team is away from the mic observing the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in the United States, we share this thoughtful discussion from our T-Minus Space Daily team. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) is the practice of intercepting and analyzing electronic signals, like phone calls, emails, radar, and telemetry, to gather actionable intelligence for national security, defense, and military operations. It’s primarily conducted by agencies like NSA, but over the last decade many companies in the commercial sector have grown in this vital area of national defense, especially in space. Our guest is Dave DeWalt, CEO of NightDragon, who shared why his firm is investing in tech and space. Dave joins T-Minus Space Daily host Maria Varmazis for this special edition podcast. You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn, and learn more about NightDragon on their website. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow T-Minus on LinkedIn and Instagram. Share your feedback. What do you think about T-Minus Space Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show.  Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here’s our media kit. Contact us at [e-mail] to request more info. Want to join us for an interview? Please send your pitch to [e-mail] and include your name, affiliation, and topic proposal. T-Minus is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the N2K Space Network. Most security conferences talk about zero-trust. Zero-trust world puts you inside. This is a hands-on cybersecurity event designed for practitioners who want real skills, not just theory. You'll take part in live hacking labs where you'll attack real environments, see how modern threats actually work, and learn how to stop them before they turn into incidents. But Zero Trust World is more than labs. You'll also experience expert-led sessions, practical case studies, and technical deep dives focused on real-world implementation.

Whether your blue team, red team, or responsible for securing an entire organization, the content is built to be immediately useful. You'll earn CPE credits, connect with peers across the industry, and leave with strategies you can put into action right away. Join us, March 4th through the 6th in Orlando, Florida. Register now at Z-T-T. www.com and take your zero-trust strategy from theory to execution. Sig-int or signals intelligence is the practice of intercepting and analyzing electronic signals like phone calls, emails, radar, or telemetry to gather actionable intelligence for national security, defense, and military operations. It's primarily conducted by agencies in the United

States like the NSA, but over the last decade, we have seen many companies in the commercial sector break through in this vital area of national defense, especially in space. Now, who is investing in these companies? Well, we ask the experts. Welcome to T-Minus space, special edition. I'm Maria Vermazes. Night Dragon is an investment advisory firm that focuses entirely on the security technology market. They recently led a Series E funding round for Hawkeye 360,

which is the first commercial company to detect, geolocate, and characterize a broad range of RF signals from a growing constellation in low Earth orbit. My guest today is Dave DeWalt, CEO of Night Dragon, on investing in technology and space. Greetings, everybody, Dave DeWalt here. I'm the founder and CEO of Night Dragon, and former multi-time CEO in the security tech world. And thank you for having me, Maria.

It's my pleasure, Dave. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. What brings us together is a conversation that I actually had with John Serafini in December about Hawkeye 360 hitting their Series E with Night Dragon support. And it just felt like a great time for me to bring you in and sort of get the Night Dragon point of view on this great news. So if you wouldn't mind telling me a bit about that seriesy and Night Dragon support of Hawkeye 360. Yeah, Maria, I wish I could have done it with John.

That would have been fun to happen. Right. Yeah, we've been honored to partner with John Seraphini. He is a rare leader in all of technology, quite frankly, and especially in space and security, national security. We've been working with the asset for, gosh, coming up on close to the fire. years and have watched the company grow and expand under John's leadership. And we really had a lot of kind of feelings about different segments and space we can get into later. But Alkii 360 is a very unique asset, as you know. We are very proud to lead and our co-lead the most recent round, which we

participated nearly every round that they've had. But you can really see the company, you know, crossing the chasm. And that is a testament to the hard work of the team. but also the partners and investors and the whole community supporting Hawkeye. And it's been all fun to see him doing preparation for public opportunities and acquisitions, which was part of this round. We acquired a company called ISA, as you know. He talked about, but the company has got a real opportunity to drive value for shareholders, but also, and maybe just as important, create a mission of securing our world.

And that is really something Hawkeye excels at is the mission of being able to help to detect bad things happening on the planet, tipping and queuing that to various responses and saving people's lives and helping to create a better world that we live in. So it's been an honor. Yeah, yeah. And I definitely want to put a pin in Night Dragons' interest in the space industry. I want to put a pin in that and go back to that. But before I get to that, I wanted to stay on Hawkeye 360. for just a moment because I am super interested with the ISA acquisition about the emphasis on improving signal processing versus merely just adding satellite capacity. And I'm curious if you can tell me more

about the strategy there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly first of all, for the listeners here, Hawkeye 360 specializes in low Earth orbit SDR, so software-defined radios that essentially are doing radio frequency management on Earth signals coming from the ground. We now have 12 clusters, 13 clusters up and running across the world. We've got some powerful revisit rates, really covering most of the planet at this point. We'll continue to expand that. But really, signal processing is at the heart of it. And AI and software is the core of that.

And this company has really created an unbelievable database of patterns of life recognition around ground-based RF admissions. So knowing the difference between a ship in the ocean that is dark and perhaps have its AIS transponders turned off and you might be hearing or listening to a push-to-talk radio on the ship to perhaps an aircraft that's flying, commercial versus military, or a GPS jammer, or just about any signal coming off the ground. these patterns of life recognition really helps create a very powerful way of creating response to whatever anomalous behavior might be occurring with those patterns of life. So to use your phrase, signal intelligence, that signal intelligence, the faster you can identify it with the greater accuracy and efficacy creates a very powerful platform. And proud to say, Hawkeye-360 has very, very, very high efficacy, very low false positives, very strong patterns of life recognition, creating it a real important apparatus to all the SIGN

platforms around the world. Now many nation states are using this platform. And it's become, you know, I believe, a vital piece of infrastructure for, you know, not just the world to use, but to create peace, like I mentioned as well, with a platform like theirs. Going back to sort of, you know, Night Dragons' interest in segments of the space industry, I can see how, given how you're describing what Hawkeye 360 is doing and that efficacy you were talking about with SIGAN, how it also fits into the larger picture of what Night Dragon is interested in, and the kind of companies that you all invest in. And I'm curious if you could tell me a bit more about Night Dragon's interest, specifically in space.

Yeah, Maria. So again, for the listeners, for 30 seconds, Night Dragons, an investment advisory firm, we focused entirely on the security tech market. So security tech, much like biotech or FinTech, is, essentially focused on all five domains of security, particularly risks and threats happening across all five domains. So we're talking about space, obviously, but certainly other areas like air and maritime are important to us,

ground and land-based systems. And then also the invisible domain, I like to call it, which is cyber, AI, quantum areas. And as we're knowing, Maria, like these are all morphing together a bit and space meets cyber. Cyber meets supply chain, supply chain meets space, maritime meet space, and you tip and queue these SIG-in platforms to work together across all domains. So to answer your question, Night Dragon focuses in on deploying capital into security tech companies. We've really focused largely on the biggest threats and risks in all those five domains.

And particularly in space, we see national security areas as extremely important. We believe that space is a frontier now that's becoming incredibly important, not just incredibly important already is. It is the future of our geographies, our economies, our infrastructure, the race to the moon is incredibly important, as you know, and I've always spoken about. But whoever controls space and can secure space really is going to have an incredible economic advantage as well as a national security. advantage. So we see this domain as extremely important to the future of mankind and certainly from an American point of view, an American future as well. We'll be right back. Ever wished you could rebuild your network from scratch to make it more secure, scalable, and simple? Meet Meter, the company reimagining enterprise networking from the ground up.

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When it comes to mobile application security, good enough is a risk. A recent survey shows that 72% of organizations reported at least one mobile application security incident last year, and 92% of responders reported threat levels have increased in the past two years. Guard Square delivers the highest level of security for your mobile apps without compromising performance, time to market, or user experience. Discover how Guard Square provides industry-leading security for your Android and iOS apps at www.gardesquare.com. I'm wondering about, so Nike Dragons's ongoing support of Hawkeye 360, maybe how that investment interacts with other portfolio companies of yours.

Yeah, quite a few. In fact, Maria, we also had an investment. We did similar timing called Capella Space, which you know, Capela focused in on synthetic aperture radar or SAR technology, another microwaving kind of set of capabilities that allowed you to see through clouds. And at night, particularly important with the Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, which had heavy cloud cover and oftentimes missions during nighttime. So synthetic aperture radar is important. Hawkeye partnering and tipping and queuing between RF signals and that of taking images of the ground through clouds.

at nighttime was extremely important. They continued to work together. Now, Capella, we sold. We had a great exit to a quantum company, which is a whole conversation into itself, but a company called IonQ, which was a public company, acquired Capella space, but it was really important

because we see a lot of threats and risk to communications. And as you know, probably the most killer application in space right now is communications, next generation communication. Most of our fiber optic cables on the ocean floor are slowly but surely moving to space. We're seeing next generation communication platforms coming and really being needed to serve this entire planet. And at the heart of communications is secure communications. So, you know, Capella's capabilities with SAR and comms coupled with quantum-based encryption and resiliency became important.

So that's just the name two of them. We also have quite a few other companies involved. this with maritime and air domains as well. A company called Serronic, which makes maritime drones and swarm drones. These have the ability to do RF signaling from the maritime domain, but also tipping and queuing to space domains as well. So if you see something in space, you can tip and queue to maritime. Maritime can also create a response platform there as well. But we see that integrated to just every domain at this point. So Hawkeye becomes an epicenter of a lot of signal processing, but also these other domain and portfolio companies we have as well, signaling

back and forth, working together as one. And that's really our Night Dragon vision. What can we do to bring all our portfolio companies together, have them work together, really augmenting significant significant platforms around the world and response in a way that enables the latest technology, cutting-age technology to really survive and thrive. And that's what we're all about here at Night Dragon. That's awesome. And I'm also wondering, I don't often get to talk to people who have such a great vision into cybersecurity as well. So I have to ask a space cyber question. I'm curious, as you were mentioning about the importance of space connectivity and securing space communications, what interests you in the realm of space cyber, if we want to call it that right now? Oh, a vast array of threats in risk, Maria. As you know, I was CEO of FIRE and Mandi and before that, McAfee. You know, I've had 20 years of knowing breaches and. issues related to this domain. And when you think about cyber, you know, we first watch, you know, kind of hacktivism, give way to crime. Crime give way to, you know, some sort of espionage.

Espanage give way to terrorism, give way to warfare, warfare in a form of disruption and destruction of assets. And now we have a whole range of dangers happening in that cyber domain. Apply that to space. And it's a pretty scary world. So you start with, are these platforms secured by design. Have we built the satellites, the communications, the infrastructure, so it can't be hacked? How do we help solve that problem? I call it Silicon the satellite. How do we think about securing silicon the satellite? And if we don't think about Silicon the satellite for security, you know, bad things can happen. So, you know, the first thing is design of security natively in to make sure what we put up in space has resiliency to threats and attacks.

And we've watched this during these, you know, various conflicts around the world. But aside from that, you start to then go to weaponization from space. We're now seeing a lot of capabilities from space as well to do hacking from space as well. So not only can they be hacked, they can hack. So the power of these platforms are really interesting. Maria as next generation invisible domains kind of meet these new domains. And I have to say, I just love being in the middle of it. It's a mission to be a part of it. I'm just thankful for Night Dragon and the team to give us a capability to hopefully make a difference in the world.

Well, that's fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing your expertise and your vision with me, Dave. And I'm just thrilled that I finally got a chance to speak with you. I want to make sure I give you the last word. If there's anything you want to leave our audience with that we didn't talk about, but you wanted to mention, I want to give you that chance. Yeah, I mean, I would just say, you know, 2026 is going to be an interesting year from a lot of point of view, exciting. I always use the adage, you know, may we live in interesting times, which is a curse potentially and a blessing. And so being vigilant at these times is really important. And my main message to you is part of saying that is it takes a village, right?

We need public-private partnerships. We need partners like yourself and the media. to help create education of the issues and the risks and the threats. But everybody's got to work together if we're going to secure this domain and create economic advantages for everybody on the planet. So I think 2026 is kind of a crossing the chasm year. And it's a big year for space. It's a big year for threats and political, military, otherwise economic.

So, again, I'm just proud to be a part of it and look forward to being part of the village. Thank you so much, Dave. Thank you for your time. I greatly appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Maria. Thanks for having me. That's T-Mina special edition, brought to you by N2K CyberWire.

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