We’re an autonomy company with a human-machine interface obsession

Our Mission

Enabling warfighters to more naturally harness the power of increasingly complex military systems.

We’re a team of engineers and former special operators with roots in world-class prototyping organizations and elite military units. This lineage creates a unique blend of user intimacy, bias for utility, and creative engineering - all fueled by an undeniable get-it-done factor. We’re laser-focused on the mission of national security and work hard to deeply understand warfighter challenges across the industry.

Primordial Labs team at flight test in Norway

Our Vision

The time has come for a high-torque interface that enables human-machine collaborative excellence — that’s what we’re building.

The DoD has come to terms with its “Big Data” problem and taken significant steps to address it. But in a race to pursue advanced autonomous capabilities and a one-to-many human to robot ratio, we believe the Department is on the verge of a new challenge — a “Big Robot” problem.

AI’s true potential will never be unlocked until we account for the human warfighter’s place within this high-tech future. The answer is a better interface, one that allows for faster adoption, greater trust, and more natural interaction between humans and an increasing number of machine and computer counterparts. Primordial Labs is building this exact solution.

Leadership

Lee Ritholtz

CEO & Co-Founder
Lee is a hands-on technical executive who loves building AI systems and high-performing teams. He has extensive experience applying machine learning to a variety of DoD problems ranging from sensor processing to autonomous platform control. Prior to founding Primordial Labs, Lee was a technical leader at Lockheed Martin where he served as Director and Chief AI Architect for the Applied AI organization. Before that, he spent the better part of a decade at the Skunk Works.
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Adrian Pope

CTO & Co-Founder
Prior to founding Primordial Labs, Adrian was a Principal AI Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin, where he successfully developed and deployed AI-based ISR and EW payloads for special mission unmanned systems. Adrian has led research teams on numerous defense-focused S&T projects, most notably DARPA’s 2020 AlphaDogfight Trials. Adrian has extensive experience designing and deploying human-centric AI solutions for defense use cases in both research and operational settings.
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