This DC Tech Startup Just Landed on TechCrunch’s Most Exclusive List of 200

Out of thousands of global applicants, Washington, D.C.-based Lola Vision Systems has been selected for TechCrunch’s 2026 Startup Battlefield 200, the annual curated list of the most promising early-stage startups in the world. The company will exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this October alongside the cohort that VCs, corporates, and the global tech press use to identify what’s next.

Startup Battlefield is not an accelerator. It is a selection. Previous alumni include Dropbox, Cloudflare, Discord, and Trello, companies that made the list before they became household names. The 200 compete for $100,000 in equity-free funding and pitch live in front of top-tier Silicon Valley investors. Now add to that roster: a Black-founded, sub-10-person fabless semiconductor company building AI chips for the United States Department of Defense.

The selection arrives weeks after Lola Vision announced a separate milestone: an industry partnership with SCALE, the largest defense microelectronics workforce consortium in the country. Two institutional validations in the same month. One from Silicon Valley. One from the Pentagon’s talent pipeline.

Lola Vision Systems is a fabless semiconductor company designing AI system-on-chiplets (SoCs) for autonomous machines. Founded in 2023 and headquartered at 875 South 15th Street NW in Washington, D.C., the company builds edge-AI silicon for mission-critical applications.

In plain terms: Lola Vision designs the processors that power real-time decision-making in machines that operate where there is no cloud connectivity, no second chance, and no margin for latency. Think autonomous defense platforms, not consumer gadgets.

The technical stack:

The company is ITAR-ready and CMMC 2.0 compliant. It is building toward first silicon, the milestone where a chip design moves from simulation to physical fabrication. That’s the event that separates a design firm from a hardware company.

A D.C. native and Purdue University graduate (B.S. Electrical Engineering Technology), Adesanya was a student-athlete who earned All-American and Big Ten Championship honors before entering the semiconductor industry. He holds dual MBAs: International Business from Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business and Leadership from European Business School.

His career reads like a deliberate buildup to this company. Five years as a field sales engineer at ON Semiconductor. Client engagement at Microchip Technology. A role at SiFive, the leading RISC-V processor architecture firm. Then more than three years at Synopsys, the world’s largest electronic design automation company, where he sold the IP and tools that companies use to build custom processors.

In 2023, he stopped selling the tools and started using them.

In 2025, Adesanya won $125,000 at Invest Fest’s pitch competition in Atlanta, presenting Lola Vision to more than 25,000 attendees.

Based in Denver, Hollines holds a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Denver, an MBA in Innovation from the University of Denver, and completed executive education at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Currently pursuing a PhD, he serves as the company’s edge AI architect, building computer-vision and RF-signal-intelligence systems that run on Lola Vision’s silicon.

A graduate of University of Pennsylvania (M.S. Organizational Systems & Dynamics) and Morgan State University (B.A. Organizational Communication), Bush focuses on investor relations and workforce development. He co-led the creation of Lola Vision Systems Frontier Tech Fellowship, an 8-week, high-intensity program that trains early-career engineers in embedded AI, sensor intelligence, and autonomy for defense applications. The fellowship’s first cohort has already placed graduates into ASIC design roles at companies like Microchip Technology, effectively building the same clearance-eligible talent pipeline that SCALE produces at the university level. His broader career includes HHS program management and consulting in regulated, government-facing environments: structured delivery, procurement navigation, and translating technical capability into contract-ready value. At Lola Vision, those disciplines are the difference between building edge-AI silicon and actually getting it into the hands of defense buyers.

A Purdue University graduate (B.S. Electrical Engineering) with a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University, Page brings more than 15 years of avionics and defense systems engineering to Lola Vision. He currently serves as Lead System Engineer at L3Harris Technologies on the C-130J military avionics program, and previously held principal engineering roles at Elbit Systems of America (a defense electronics contractor), Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and GE Aviation, where he began his career in GE’s elite Edison Engineering program. Page also sits on the Board of Directors of Purdue’s Engineering Alumni Association. His background spans requirements verification, system architecture, and hardware qualification for military and commercial aviation platforms, the exact discipline required to take an AI chiplet from design to defense-certified silicon.

Days before the TechCrunch selection became public, Lola Vision announced its partnership with SCALE: the Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement program.

SCALE is the largest defense microelectronics public-private-academic workforce consortium in the United States. Led by Purdue University, managed by Naval Surface Warfare Center (Crane Division), and backed by over $100 million in Department of Defense funding through FY2027. The program expanded from a $19.2 million contract in 2020 to its current $100 million ceiling in May 2026, making it Purdue’s largest-ever federally funded research effort. It connects 35 partner universities with more than 60 industry partners and has produced 800-plus clearance-eligible microelectronics professionals.

Why this matters for Lola Vision specifically:

Three of the four universities that produced Lola Vision’s founding team were already inside SCALE before the company joined. As the company stated: “We did not discover SCALE. We came out of it.”

The operational implication: SCALE produces the country’s largest coordinated pipeline of clearance-eligible defense microelectronics engineers. For a company building classified-capable silicon, access to that pipeline is the difference between having a product roadmap and having a hiring schedule.

The defense semiconductor sector operates under a constraint that most technology markets do not: security clearances. The engineers who design chips for classified programs must be U.S. persons who have undergone extensive background investigation. This talent cannot be sourced offshore, expedited through capital, or produced at scale without institutional infrastructure.

The CHIPS and Science Act directed $52.7 billion toward domestic semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. SCALE is the workforce side of that national effort. Lola Vision just positioned itself on the demand side of both.

Meanwhile, the TechCrunch Battlefield 200 selection puts the company in front of the venture capital community at scale. Defense technology companies have historically raised from specialized defense-focused funds (Lux Capital, Andreessen’s American Dynamism, Shield Capital). A Disrupt exhibition puts Lola Vision in front of generalist investors who are increasingly looking at dual-use AI hardware as the next infrastructure bet.

Lola Vision Systems is early by traditional startup metrics: fewer than 10 employees, under $1 million raised, pre-revenue, pre-silicon. But defense hardware companies don’t follow SaaS trajectories. The path is longer, the capital requirements are higher, and the moats, once established, are nearly impenetrable.

The relevant benchmarks are different: SCALE industry partnership (secured), Startup Battlefield 200 selection (secured), ITAR readiness (confirmed), CMMC 2.0 compliance (confirmed), first silicon (forthcoming), DoD contract engagement (forthcoming).

The company is hiring RTL designers, verification engineers, physical design specialists, and compiler toolchain developers later this year. For engineers in those disciplines, particularly those emerging from SCALE partner universities, this is a ground-floor entry point at a company building at the silicon layer of American defense.

A Black-founded semiconductor startup, headquartered in Washington, D.C., has in the span of one month received validation from both TechCrunch and the Department of Defense’s workforce infrastructure. It is led by founders who spent careers inside ON Semiconductor, Synopsys, and SiFive before deciding to build their own chip company. It is building for the warfighter, not the consumer. And it is doing it from the nation’s capital, not Sand Hill Road.

Lola Vision Systems will exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this October. The last time a company this early got this much institutional positioning this fast in defense AI hardware, it wasn’t Black-founded.

That part is new.