Jesse spent 20 years in the United States Air Force as an AC-130 gunship aviator and drone squadron commander before earning his graduate degree in machine learning from MIT. He didn’t found Victus from a whiteboard, he founded it from the field, having operated in exactly the kinds of GPS-denied, jammed, and contested environments where today’s autonomy software falls apart.
That experience is the origin of everything Victus builds.
After retiring from the Air Force, Jesse took his operational insight into MIT’s research environment, where he developed the machine learning framework that became Victus’s core technology. He launched the company in the summer of 2024, took it through Techstars, raised a pre-seed round in Q1 2025, and completed the seed round in early 2026, all while staying deliberately under the radar.
Victus is now coming out of stealth. Jesse’s mission is the same as it’s always been: make sure the machine works when it counts.