Founders: Dan Wright (CEO), Jon Runyan, Pradeep Nair
Launched: 2023
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $465 million
Valuation: $2 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, edge computing, machine learning
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0
The legacy cloud is built across centralized data centers, which are now proliferating around the world as AI requires more computing power.
San Francisco-based Armada offers an alternative system design: modular data centers attached to existing sources of energy, including solar power and gas flares produced by oil wells. The modular data centers enable AI processing to occur on-site rather than requiring data to be transmitted. The company says they can be deployed within days.
New technological systems to produce compute power matter, especially to the U.S. military, as the United States returns to an aggressive foreign policy that will increasingly depend on AI-driven technology. The United States is racing with China to capture the AI advantage and the energy infrastructure to power it.
Armada is selling modular data centers to the U.S. military and some industries, such as mining, telecommunications, and oil and gas, that operate in what Armada calls "rugged" environments, including those in allied countries. The U.S. Navy used Armada in its UNITAS Naval exercise with partners in the Americas, with Rear Admiral Carlos Sardiello noting that modular data centers and edge computing helps the U.S. Navy operate at sea.
On Tuesday, Armada announced a $230 million round of funding which valued the company at $2 billion and brought on Johnson Controls as a strategic investor and manufacturing partner for a new data center factory in Arizona.
"This is all about the scaling," CEO Dan Wright told CNBC's Morgan Brennan about the deal with Johnson Controls. "We are scaling with our customers globally and this will enable us to do continuous manufacturing of our Galleon modular data centers, so we can deploy them even faster. ... Right now, we're seeing this massive shift from just training these AI models to inference," he said, referring to the deployment of AI model learning in real world applications. "Winning this AI race will be about being able to deploy these fast. ... It's like AI in a box, deployed extremely fast, wherever you need it," Wright added.
Previously, Armada announced a strategic funding round of $131 million in July 2025 from investors including Pinegrove Ventures, Veriten and Glade Brook, with participation from existing investors including Founders Fund, Lux Capital and M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund).
The company announced a memorandum of understanding to become an official collaborator on the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, designed to connect the nation's National Laboratories, supercomputers, and federal datasets into an AI-enabled research platform. State and local governments have also used Armada technology, such as during the Los Angeles wildfires.
Wright previously led AI firm DataRobot, but after a messy exit involving executive stock sales, he and attorney Jon Runyan founded Armada in late 2022, with Pradeep Nair, a former VMWare and Microsoft executives, as founding CTO.
With the United States engaged in war and an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, increased military spending is likely to propel Armada's approach. Wright has called America's AI race with China "the defining race of our time."
"At Armada," Wright wrote in a LinkedIn post "we're building the distributed AI infrastructure America needs to win."
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