05/19/2026
“I see an opportunity to be a strategic partner to the government on the most important national security problems that we’re facing.”
Nini Hamrick, MBA ’20, was in middle school in downtown Washington, D.C. when the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11. “I started to understand the impact of a national security failure,” she says. That set her on a path to the Defense Intelligence Agency, to Afghanistan, and to co-founding a defense technology company.
The seed for Vannevar Labs was planted during Hamrick’s deployment as a counterterrorism intelligence officer, when one of her teammates built a tool that saved her hours on data analysis. “I was so grateful,” Hamrick says. “I kept trying to replicate that experience afterward: How do I find a great software engineer who really understands national security and can help me move faster?”
At Stanford GSB, Hamrick found her answer in classmate Brett Granberg, who shared her background in intelligence. “He said to me, ‘There needs to be more great and software engineering companies focused on the hard problems that people like you worked on in government,’” Hamrick recalls. “Once he said it, it just clicked.”
Stanford GSB proved essential to building Vannevar, from building “AI products that actually work in the field,” Hamrick says, to learning how to market them and secure funding. “I had no private-sector experience. The GSB was exactly where I needed to be when I was starting a company. I really couldn't imagine one without the other.”
Today, Vannevar has scaled to $80 million in annual revenue, and Hamrick wants to take it public. “It’s exciting to [be] among a generation of new defense companies that have the opportunity to get to that level of partnership with the U.S. government, where they’re trusting you to take on the largest problems.”
This founder is bringing new technology to the intelligence industry.
