How We Win
Without Government
Contracts.

Argus builds autonomous ISR drones that fly without GPS — $4,000 per unit versus $50,000+ for legacy systems, NDAA-compliant, U.S.-built. The U.S. military is our wedge, but this brief is built around a different question: can Argus win as a venture-scale company even if zero government contracts ever convert? We believe the answer is yes, and this document lays out why.

What's inside

• The no-government-contracts thesis — five structural reasons Argus wins in private markets independent of DoD revenue.
• Team breakdown — founders, five engineering pods, and the operating model behind 16 unpaid people shipping at scale.
• Use of $250K — exactly what a $250K check unlocks, with a dollar-by-dollar deployment plan and 90-day milestones.
• Private-sector GTM — four target verticals, sales motion, pricing, competitive positioning, and 18-month commercial milestones.

Government contracts accelerate Argus.

They do not define it.

Government revenue is the wedge most defense-tech companies bet the entire company on. Argus is structured differently. The same engineering investment that makes our drone defensible to the U.S. Army makes it dominant in four commercial markets where the buyers are not the Pentagon.

1. 01

   The unit-cost moat is structural, not subsidized.

   $4K per unit versus $30K–$150K for incumbent commercial drones is a 7–37x cost advantage, and it does not come from a DoD subsidy. It comes from our vertical-integration roadmap (motors, batteries, flight controllers, frames built in-house) and from designing for attritability from day one. Even if every defense contract evaporated, Argus would still be the only autonomous ISR-grade drone available at sub-$10K to civilian buyers.

2. 02

   Software margins compound across every customer.

   Autonomy is an 80%+ gross-margin recurring product. The same vision-nav, mission-planning, and fleet-ops stack that flies a drone in a contested combat zone flies it through a pipeline canyon, a multi-floor warehouse, or a state-park grid search. A $1K/month subscription across 100 mid-market commercial customers is $1.2M ARR with no government anywhere on the revenue.

3. 03

   NDAA pricing power exists outside the DoD.

   The DJI ban does not stop at the Pentagon. 30+ U.S. states have procurement restrictions on Chinese drones for state and local agencies. U.S. utilities, water districts, municipal services, and increasingly insurance-driven enterprise buyers require NDAA-compliant gear. Every quarter that perimeter expands — and we are pre-qualified on day one.

4. 04

   Civilian markets test cheaper and iterate faster.

   DoD procurement runs 12–36 months. A county fire department or a mid-market utility can issue a department-level purchase order in 30–60 days. We close six to ten direct civilian sales in the time it takes to close a single DoD contract — every one of them paid, no free hardware, no extended evaluation. Faster feedback, real revenue, deeper moat. Civilian revenue is the fastest path to the next round — and the cheapest place to fail and learn.

5. 05

   Our founder DNA is civilian-expansion-first.

   Sellab grew up in a warzone. He is not building Argus to chase government contracts — he is building it to put autonomous ISR in the hands of every operator who needs eyes in places GPS cannot reach: search-and-rescue teams in state parks, ranchers with 500 head of cattle, utility crews after a storm. Civilian expansion is not a hedge against DoD risk. It is the entire mission.

Government contracts accelerate Argus.

They do not define it.

16 people total. 2 founders, 14 engineers across 5 functional pods. All SJSU. All currently unpaid. Every dollar raised has gone into prototype hardware, not burn. Founders meet daily with pod leads.

Leadership

Sellab Ahmadzai

CEO · Founder

Background. Born and raised in Afghanistan. Survived six bombings before age twelve. Junior at SJSU; going full-time on Argus after May 2026 semester. Currently 70+ hours/week on the company.

Why he wins. Lived the problem. Founded Argus to build the ISR platform he wished existed growing up. Personal mission, not a market opportunity.

Owns. Vision, fundraising, military and government relationships, GTM strategy, hardware integration oversight, partnerships.

Hrittik Chatterjee

CTO · Co-founder

Background. Ex-Tesla Autopilot — sensor fusion and robotics. Held standing offers from Rivian and IBM, walked away from all of them. Built an AI-kernel OS that generates engineering CAD and PCB designs from natural language. Background in agricultural AI.

Why he wins. Deepest autonomy stack a 22-year-old could realistically build. Quit Tesla to work unpaid on Argus — the costliest-possible signal of conviction.

Owns. Engineering org, autonomy software, hardware-software integration, technical hiring, R&D direction.

Five pods of 2–4 engineers is the smallest unit that can run truly parallel build tracks. Today's capital funds one pod's hardware needs at a time. With the round closed, all five run concurrently — that is the velocity unlock the company is built around.

A $250K check from F.inc lands inside our $2M pre-seed at $18M post-money cap (roughly 1.39% of Argus). Below is exactly where every dollar goes and what each line unlocks. Every line is sized for engineering iteration speed first — hardware, validation, and pod-lead retainers exist to compress the build cycle, not to capitalize the company.

Milestones $250K unlocks (next 90 days)

• Three parallel build tracks live, not one — vision nav, thermal integration, and C2 comms iterate concurrently.
• Pod leads off side work, fully on the build — outside-consulting hours convert into nightly iteration cycles through round close and Phase II execution.
• Iteration loop weeks → days. Component lead time drops because we hold parallel inventory rather than waiting on each batch sequentially.
• 5–10 prototype airframes flying simultaneously, enabling proper A/B testing of design variants.
• Live demo at Army xTech hackathon (San Francisco) with Shield, IQT, DCVC, and Palantir judging — fully funded for travel and on-site iteration.
• First commercial production SKU branched from the defense firmware, ready to ship as a paid first-order to the lead public-safety customer.
• Manufacturing partner relationships in place for the first 50-unit production run.

Defense is the wedge, not the ceiling. The same product, the same engineering team, the same unit cost — aimed at four civilian markets where the buyers are not the Pentagon and the sales cycles are 4–10x shorter.

The four verticals are not pursued in parallel — they are sequenced. Each vertical funds the next. Each first-order customer becomes the named-reference that opens the next ten conversations. Below is the order of operations, the wedge inside each vertical, and the channel architecture that lets a 16-person company cover four buyer categories without a 30-person sales floor.

Sequencing logic

Land mechanic — direct paid first-order

Argus does not run pilots. The hardware price is the wedge. A $4K NDAA-compliant airframe with thermal payload and GPS-denied autonomy is already cheaper than what these buyers spend on a single demo unit from Skydio or Flyability. Giving hardware away would reset the price anchor we built the company around — so we don't. Every customer is a paying customer from order one.

Why no pilots

• The unit price is the wedge. $4K hardware is already 7–37x cheaper than the incumbent. There is nothing left to discount and nothing to gain by pretending the first sale is a trial.
• Pilots burn engineering cycles on unpaid users. Every fielded airframe has a customer success cost. We owe support to people who paid us, not to people who promised to maybe pay us in six months.
• Procurement is faster without a pilot wrapper. A single department-head purchase ships in 30–60 days. A formal pilot RFP is a 6–12 month detour with a maybe at the end.
• Free hardware sets a worse price anchor than no sale at all. Once a buyer learns they can get an Argus airframe at zero cost, the next purchase order arrives priced at zero too.

Expand mechanic — first order to fleet ARR

• Public Safety: 1–2 unit department purchase → multi-department state grant procurement → standardized state-level contract. 5–10x expansion within 12–18 months. The state contract becomes the precedent for the next four states.
• Critical Infrastructure: 4-unit site evaluation order → multi-site MSA → autonomy software subscription layered on every airframe. Once an SCADA integrator certifies us, distribution to peer utilities is mostly typed up rather than sold.
• Agriculture: Anchor ranch direct order → channel push through ag-distributors and crop-insurance underwriters offering loss-prevention rebates that pay for the fleet. Insurance is the buyer behind the buyer.
• Private Security: Marquee biotech or logistics campus first-order → integrated into a national security prime's existing book of business. We become the drone line item inside someone else's MSA.

Geographic wedge

Year 1 is California, Texas, and the Mountain West — three regions where every vertical's first-order customer already lives within a day's drive of San Jose. State Parks, Santa Cruz Sheriff, Central Valley ag, Bay Area biotech campuses, Texas-Oklahoma midstream pipelines, Wyoming and Montana cattle alliances. No regional sales hires required for the first 18 months. Year 2 expands east on the back of named-reference customers, not on the back of headcount.

Demand-gen surfaces (next 12 months)

Pipeline KPIs (12-month targets)

Combined: ~$632K signed ARR in the first 12 months without a federal contract — every dollar paid, no free hardware, no extended evaluation deployments. By Month 18 the same motion clears the $800K–$900K full-anchor steady state cited in the next section — entirely on private-sector revenue, with hardware compounding into multi-year software ARR underneath it.

• Hardware gross margin target: 40–50% (defense baseline ~40%).
• Autonomy software subscription: tiered by mission complexity and fleet size. $100/mo (basic patrol) → $1K/mo (enterprise fleet).
• Managed services (optional): for security and critical-infrastructure verticals, bundle ops + hardware at a flat monthly rate. 3–5x lifetime value.
• Never discount the hardware SKU below the $4K defense price. Private-sector pricing premiums reflect integration and support, not gouging.

Illustrative Year-1 ARR per anchor customer

Numbers are illustrative anchor contracts in Year 1. With 10 anchor customers across the four verticals we clear roughly $800K–$900K ARR — software running ~30% of total and expanding every year. None of this revenue requires a U.S. government contract.

The autonomous-ISR-grade drone market splits four ways below us. Each competitor wins one or two of the dimensions buyers care about. None wins all four.

vs. Self-build / internal drone programs

Utilities and ranchers who try to assemble their own drone programs consistently fail on integration and software. We sell the full stack at a price point that beats the raw bill-of-materials of a self-build, before labor.

Government revenue, if and when it arrives, is upside on this baseline.

1. 01

   Our unit cost.

   $4K hardware breaks the price barrier for buyer categories that have been priced out of professional autonomous drones. The addressable customer count for a $4K drone is 10–50x larger than for a $30K drone, which reshapes the TAM math completely.

2. 02

   Our vertical integration roadmap.

   Motors, batteries, flight controllers, and frames built in-house let us absorb cost pressure, protect margin, and ship consistent SKUs across civilian and defense product lines.

3. 03

   Our software moat.

   The autonomy stack that flies the drone without GPS in a warzone flies it through a mine, a canyon, a multi-floor warehouse, or a power substation. One engineering investment, every vertical.

4. 04

   Our team.

   Sixteen people. Two founders. Five engineering pods. Zero salary drawn since inception. Walked away from FAANG offers to work unpaid, on-campus daily. The bar for joining is voluntarily giving up six-figure offers.

Government contracts accelerate Argus.

They do not define it.