Chariot Defense chases silent power for laser weapons

silent, high-voltage – Chariot Defense, a San Francisco battery startup led by Adam Warmoth, is betting that the next leap in laser and directed-energy weapons will depend less on hype and more on high-voltage power architecture—technology proven through electric vehicles and now ad

By the time Adam Warmoth started talking about Chariot Defense’s “Amphora” battery system, the story had already moved beyond product details.

Warmoth’s core point—woven through his career and now reflected in the company’s push for scaled production—starts with a battlefield problem that can’t be solved by simply turning up the power the way civilians imagine it. The moment. he says. came as “this incredible breakthrough” in high-voltage batteries and silicon carbide electronics was being commercialized through electric vehicles and electric aircraft—while defense. in his view. stayed stuck with power architectures that don’t fit the demands of lasers.

Chariot Defense. based in San Francisco and founded and led by Warmoth. is building battlefield power systems designed to bridge an “energy gap” at the tactical edge. Its Amphora battery system is described as providing modular voltage and low-signature power for radios. drones. sensors. and directed energy systems.

Warmoth traces the genesis to SOF Week 2024. saying it was “almost exactly two years ago” when he had the light-bulb realization. He had been working with commercial high-voltage battery technology and silicon carbide power electronics at Archer. Uber Elevate. and Kitty Hawk. and watching how companies such as Tesla and Rivian were pushing it forward. In his telling, the defense world wasn’t absorbing that shift fast enough.

Half his career was in electric aircraft. The other half was at Anduril, where he served as a program manager for counter-drone systems and air defense systems. In contested expeditionary environments, he said, passive systems needed a high active draw when making an intercept. His workaround there was to run large diesel generators inefficiently 24/7, creating a targetable signature and bringing reliability issues.

What he wanted. he said. was a deployable product that could operate in a military environment. use a secure non-Chinese supply chain. and be designed to interoperate with the U.S. military’s existing equipment around power generation and mobility. When he looked for something he could buy, he said he didn’t find it. And then he connected the dots: he believed eVTOL technology was now mature and ready for employment just as the battlefield was becoming more decentralized. distributed. and reliant on electronic systems such as drones and counter-drone systems.

Power, not just energy, is where the fight begins

For people who picture power as something you “plug into the wall. ” Warmoth says. the trap is thinking it’s unlimited. He points to how household breakers behave when too much load is pulled at once. Scaling up into laser weapons—from 10 kilowatt levels into megawatt-class systems. in his description—requires rethinking the underlying power architecture. including moving toward high voltage.

He ties that shift directly to EV and eVTOL engineering. He argues that platforms such as Tesla, Rivian, Archer, and Joby use 400V battery architectures. Using the relationship “power equals current times voltage. ” he says that getting to higher power means you either accept higher current or higher voltage. With the low-voltage architecture used in many military systems today. higher current forces bigger cables. increases thermal loss. and creates waste-heat burdens.

At the higher voltages required for the next step, Warmoth says traditional solid-state electronics transistors break down, and that’s why there was “no real way” to do large-scale power conversion without massive transformers and substations.

The enabling material, he says, is silicon carbide. He describes it as allowing the kind of digital and solid-state control used for data to be applied to larger flows of power at higher voltages where older electronics would fail.

Warmoth points to Tesla’s engineering timeline: from the Model S in 2012 to the Model 3 in 2018. he says Tesla cut the size and weight of their drive inverter by a factor of 10. In his view. that order-of-magnitude reduction is what makes 10 kW and 50 kW levels feasible without massive transformers that would make mobile laser weapon employment impossible. He adds that his engineering talent comes from that EV and eVTOL world.

Chariot’s pitch: hybrid surges without the generator signature

Warmoth says Chariot’s system is built around how laser weapons actually draw power. Laser systems and directed energy systems require a high demand for power delivered quickly. he explains. even if the overall aggregate energy used in a shot is low because firing is short—“a couple seconds. ” then power demand drops to zero.

That power profile, he says, challenges traditional generation. Engines, he argues, are happy operating at one speed and are inefficient when running outside their optimal RPM. At the tactical edge. he says. the company is aiming for a hybrid approach: pairing fuel-based generation with batteries that can deliver surges.

Warmoth describes a 30 kW power system from Chariot as about a third of the size of a traditional 30 kW generator. If peak demand is 30 kW. he says it can be delivered in a system one-third the size. with a generator sized for average load charging the battery so the battery can handle large surges when a laser shot is needed.

He says the alternative—relying only on generators—creates multiple problems at once: inefficient engine operation because power is often not drawn; a targetable signature because the generator’s heat and noise must be “always on” to be ready for firing; and mobility and logistics constraints because the generator must be sized to peak demand. which he says is “three to five times larger than the equivalent battery system.” He also cites reliability issues. arguing that traditional generators fail often due to moving parts and requirements such as constant maintenance and oil changes. while battery systems and solid-state electronics do not.

Amphora is built to scale across battlefield loads, he says, not just lasers. Warmoth describes it as a platform meant to support “all of the future electronic systems on the battlefield.”

He says he sees a transition to an electronically defined battlefield, with directed energy as the most power-intensive use case. But he emphasizes other loads where field power matters: charging drone batteries fast when a drone lands; powering sensors detecting drones so counter-drone capabilities can engage targets via radars. camera systems. RF sensors. and electronic warfare systems; and charging batteries for drones and robots reliant on edge compute.

He connects that to an off-grid computing reality—systems designed assuming they are plugged into the grid, while field power sources may deliver spikes, brownouts, or blackouts. In his view, Chariot’s systems provide “clean, consistent power” for sensitive communications and compute.

“Infinite magazine,” re-framed through battery depth and silence

The “infinite magazine” idea—laser weapons that keep firing as long as power is available—comes up directly, and Warmoth argues for a more precise architecture.

He says the battery in Chariot’s larger system is 15,000 watt hours, adding that it can power a 10 kW laser shot for an hour and a half. He says the math scales proportionally up and down based on laser power needs, providing magazine depth.

But he stresses the signature and readiness advantage: all of that can be delivered “completely silently,” because the company isn’t relying on a generator idling 24/7. Instead, the battery can sit waiting 24/7 until a shot is required.

He frames urgency around threat timelines: if a small drone is flying toward you, he says you may have five seconds to respond. The system is meant to be always ready without poor fuel efficiency and without the detectable and targetable signature that comes with running generators continuously.

The deeper point, Warmoth says, is that the magazine is not truly infinite. Battery capacity will eventually be consumed—especially if it also powers communications, compute, sensors, and other loads required for a field node. That’s where the hybrid configuration matters.

If energy is brought forward in batteries alone. he says you’d need 12 pounds of batteries to match one pound of fuel in usable energy. With fuel-based backfill and recharging. he says you can extend operation without hauling a dead battery back to the rear. a tactic he calls unrealistic in a contested environment.

That, he says, is why Chariot’s thesis focuses on batteries as power delivery, not batteries as energy reserves. Battery instant power delivery is decoupled from power generation; the battery’s energy is kept as low as possible while meeting the need to manage power demands. while fuel provides magazine depth.

A bet on hype resistance—while demand accelerates

Warmoth describes a business designed to hold up under changing timelines, even as directed-energy expectations intensify. He cites developments from the past six months including officials declaring that laser weapons will be fielded at scale in three years. and President Donald Trump posting memes of lasers on Truth Social.

He says Chariot is building for robustness regardless of timelines. The company, he says, has products that can deliver value today without directed energy, though directed energy remains the “platonic ideal” use case where the hybrid system is most impactful.

He also points to the economics driving momentum. He references talk about cost differences between munitions and drones. using figures that place the cost delta at firing down a $20. 000 drone with a $3 million missile. He specifically mentions Operation Epic Fury as a catalyst for putting the cost debate “at the front of everyone’s minds.”.

Warmoth says there’s a chart floating around about falling cost per watt, or fiber laser components, and that cost reductions are occurring in core technologies and components behind laser weapons. He ties that to growing operational demand for a low-cost down capability.

He returns again to battlefield mobility as the make-or-break factor. He argues that power is less of a problem when fighting from a static position—where large diesel generators can be used and shore or grid power might even be available. In a distributed, decentralized, contested environment, he says the needs change: advanced, miniaturized, edge-deployable mobile systems. That’s where his products. he says. have their advantage by supporting efficiency. mobility. and signature management so maneuver can return to the battlefield.

He draws a comparison to Ukraine, saying he has seen trench warfare that he describes as static. “That is not a fight we want to be in,” he adds, arguing that if maneuver is the goal, systems must be on vehicle platforms—requiring modern power distribution and management.

Warmoth also says Chariot has been working with laser companies, naming Aurelius Systems as its main partner in directed energy. He says the company has completed three demos with Aurelius Systems. He also describes traveling last week to Camp Atterbury in Indiana for an exercise called Technology Readiness Experiment (T-REX). where he was powering live shootdowns of drones with Aurelius Systems’ systems. He says the live shootdowns were powered completely silently off of Chariot’s Amphora system.

Funding: $34 million to scale Amphora production

Chariot’s expansion is tied to a recent financing. Warmoth references a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.

He says much of the funding is going into scaling production. He adds that Chariot has sold Amphora systems to multiple U.S. Army units and that it has sold systems to B2B partners for counter-drone applications deployed downrange in theater—powering air defense systems in contested environments today.

The production targets include scaling Amphora 24 and taking Amphora 400 from an early pilot stage into production.

He also describes plans to explore more integrations onto different platforms, keeping the same core technology. He says existing products are bolt-on and adaptable to current platforms and power generation sources. and that the company will build out platform integrations. working with other OEMs. plus software and microgrid control software.

Supply chain: paying for secure components while the market reshapes

Warmoth addresses supply chain challenges directly, saying the advantage for Chariot is its position in the industry ecosystem. He describes Chariot as delivering “the most valuable kW hour in the world” and uses a thought experiment: if there were an auction where someone could magically deliver one kW hour of energy to anyone in usable form. he believes the winning bid would likely come from “someone on the front lines in Ukraine” who is actively targeted by drones and needs to keep electronic warfare jammer and counter-drone systems online.

That, he says, gives the company room to pay a premium for a secure supply chain for high-performance components. He adds that the company sees an opportunity to help companies reshoring and building domestic and allied production of core battery and power technology components. In his description. Chariot can act as a customer that helps those companies reduce costs because performance and secure supply chain are valued by Chariot’s own end customer base.

A fictional detour—then back to lasers

When asked about a favorite fictional laser weapon. Warmoth says the first that comes to mind is the Death Star from Star Wars. He also offers an alternative pick: the flash memory-clearing device from Men in Black. describing it as a “dazzler” that messes with the brain. He then adds that if you want a conventional answer, it’s still the Death Star.

For Chariot Defense, though, the real “weapon” it keeps returning to is not a fictional beam—it’s the unglamorous engineering required to make high-voltage, silicon-carbide-driven power conversion work silently, on the move, at the tactical edge.

Chariot Defense Amphora battery system directed energy laser weapons silicon carbide high voltage batteries Andreessen Horowitz Series A counter-drone SOF Week T-REX Camp Atterbury