Shield AI says Matt Ofilos will join as chief financial officer under CEO Gary Steele. The hire lands as the Shield AI valuation $28.8 billion sets a new mark for venture backed defense autonomy, with that figure reported by Bloomberg and not confirmed by Shield AI in this announcement.
Ofilos is a public company finance operator, not a startup generalist.
Shield AI said Ofilos joined Parsons in 2021 and became chief financial officer in 2022. Steele said Ofilos had led complex organizations across aerospace and technology, while Ofilos said Shield AI had the vision and momentum to lead defense technology. Before Parsons, Shield AI said, he was CFO of Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector and spent almost two decades in finance roles at Raytheon.
That resume matters because autonomy primes now compete on procurement discipline as much as flight performance. StartupHub.ai data places Shield AI alongside Anduril and Epirus in tracked defense autonomy, where a Parsons and Raytheon CFO signals preparation for scale.
Bloomberg reported the current round includes $1 billion in Series H funding to support a radar acquisition, a structure Shield AI did not detail in this announcement. Benzinga reported the valuation is up 127% since March, also outside what Shield AI confirmed here.
The private mark is not a market price, so the test is whether Ofilos can convert backlog and hardware margins into auditable growth.
