Riley Loftus is a San Diego-based venture capital investor at Harpoon Ventures who combines investment banking, software private equity, and seed-stage VC experience to evaluate deep tech and defense technology companies with both late-stage financial rigor and early-stage pattern recognition. He acts as a hands-on partner for founders navigating government contracting and dual-use positioning in defense and national security markets, leading investments in technically ambitious, hardware-heavy companies like MatX, Aalo Atomics, and Firestorm.

• Investing heavily in hardware space and advanced computing companies. Frequently praises founders who are shipping massive physical products or building in highly ambitious sectors, such as congratulating Astranis for meeting customer demand with their satellites and highlighting Aalo Atomics for showcasing real physical hardware at their events. Often playfully categorizes the portfolio into straightforward buckets like security battery and chip teams.
• Providing founders with critical artificial intelligence infrastructure and compute resources. Repeatedly highlights strategic partnerships established through Black Flag VC and Harpoon Ventures, pointing out specific deals with companies like Microsoft for Azure access and xAI to give founders direct access to Grok and free credits. Attends major industry conferences like NeurIPS to support portfolio companies operating in this space.
• Building a supportive ecosystem and continuously improving the venture experience for early-stage builders. Frequently asks founders for feedback on how to make Black Flag VC more accessible and valuable, while regularly hosting community events, campus outreach programs, and publicly celebrating portfolio milestones like recent raises for companies such as MatX Computing and Encord.
• Fascinated by robotics and science fiction pop culture, which makes for a great personal icebreaker. Openly shares a desire to have a custom physical robot on their desk with embedded artificial intelligence, specifically mentioning a love for characters like TARS from Interstellar and Rocky from Project Hail Mary, and even joked about trying to take a Tesla humanoid robot surfing while at a tech conference.