On October 8 and 9, during San Francisco Fleet Week, VetsinTech and the Bay Area Council will host the first-ever NatSec + Space Innovation Summit (NSSIS), a two-day convening built on a simple but overdue premise: the people who fund, build, and buy the next generation of national security technology should be in the same room as the veterans who have actually carried out the mission.
As VetsinTech CEO Katherine Webster puts it in her invitation to this year’s founding sponsors, the defense tech and space innovation ecosystem “was not born somewhere else and imported here. It was created here.” From Stanford and Berkeley labs to the workshops of the national laboratories to the garages of Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has quietly become the operating system for American defense innovation. NSSIS is designed to make that leadership visible, and to make sure veteran talent sits at the center of it, not the margins.
The timing is deliberate. The Department of War is in the middle of what Webster calls “the most significant overhaul of its innovation ecosystem in a generation,” shifting toward a commercial-first model built for speed: faster awards, dual-use products, and rapid transition from prototype to fielded capability. No region has more of what that shift requires: frontier AI companies, NASA Ames, the Defense Innovation Unit, and the deepest venture capital pool on earth, backed by institutions like UC Berkeley, Stanford, SRI International, and the Naval Postgraduate School. As the summit’s own framing puts it, the gap isn’t awareness. It’s human infrastructure, and that’s exactly what NSSIS exists to build.
Over two days at The Klamath in San Francisco, attendees will move between two distinct missions. Day One centers on careers, connecting transitioning service members and military spouses with defense tech and space employers actively hiring, closing with a VIP reception for workforce leaders, government partners, and industry hosts. Day Two is the Innovation Summit itself: senior leaders from each military branch’s innovation unit, venture investors, and early-stage defense tech founders, working through the funding pathways and partnership opportunities shaping the sector. The program will also feature the Bay Area Council’s first report on the region’s role in defense tech and space innovation, new research meant to anchor, not just accompany, the conversation.
None of this happens without the organizations stepping forward as founding sponsors. NSSIS is proud to welcome Arkenstone Defense, Blue Origin, Google, Holland & Knight, JPMorgan, Navier, Scale AI, and Shield Capital as sponsors of the inaugural summit, a roster spanning law, finance, AI, aerospace, and venture capital, all aligned around the same conviction: that veteran operational experience and Bay Area innovation capacity belong in the same room.
The summit is proud to welcome Victor Glover as keynote speaker. A retired U.S. Navy Captain and former NASA Astronaut, Glover piloted the Crew-1 Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station and served as pilot on NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon, completing a nearly 10-day journey that carried the crew 252,756 miles from Earth. A former Naval Aviator and test pilot who has flown more than 45 aircraft, Glover embodies exactly the convergence NSSIS was built to spotlight: the operational discipline of military service paired with the frontier of American innovation.
Register at https://vetsintech.co/natsec-summit.