Imagine you’re the CEO of a small Silicon Valley company that sells a compelling little device. It’s a next-generation communicator, the size of a wad of gum, that fits snugly over the user’s back tooth.
The “Molar Mic” captures the voice with high fidelity, even in surroundings of extreme noise, and wirelessly transmits audio signals to the wearer by vibrating the nerves of the inner ear. It makes the Airpod-to-iPhone interface look like tin cans on a string, and you can just imagine how valuable it might be to, say, a commando in a firefight. It’s the kind of gadget the tech genius “Q” would hand to James Bond before he goes out on a mission—except that it’s totally real.
Normally, you’d be thrilled if Fortune called you up with a chance to tell the world about it. But there’s one, huge problem: Because real-life national-security types are your ideal customers for the Molar Mic—indeed, may already be buying it—you’re forbidden from talking about it very much at all.
“I can’t,” Peter Hadrovic, the company’s CEO, tells me. “ I know it seems weird that I’ve got all this publicity here I’m walking away from, but…”
Hadrovic’s company is called Integrated Tactical Technologies. On its website, the company goes by the acronym “iT2,” an aptly opaque choice for a business that’s the opposite of public-facing.
There’s a fraught pause. Hadrovic looks off into the low middle distance. He’s 6-foot-9 and still built like a skinny center, the tall-man position he played on Princeton’s basketball team. “Can’t talk about it,” he says, breaking into an apologetic smile. “I’m not selling it to anybody who I can say I’m selling it to.”
He’s not saying he’s selling it to real-life James Bonds. But he’s not not saying that, either. And he didn’t turn down the interview outright, because he very much wants to say nice things about a stealthy venture capital fund called In-Q-Tel, whose 2009 investment made building the device possible.
“There’s no way the Molar Mic exists, but for In-Q-Tel,” Hadrovic says.
In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 by the CIA—yes that CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency—with the mission of closing a perceived innovation gap between Washington’s security establishment and Silicon Valley. Inventions like the Molar Mic are the reason In-Q-Tel exists. Over its 26 years in business, the fund has helped launch more than 800 companies. Of the companies in this year’s NatSec 100 Report, an annual index of the fastest-growing venture-backed defense startups, In-Q-Tel is an investor in 32—far more than any other fund.
