There are plenty of conventional indicators that signal that a product is turning heads: Weekly active user figures start to soar, products fly off the shelves, there is unsolicited praise.
But for San Diego-based Shield AI, validation has looked a little different. In April of this year, Russian armed forces fired two HESA Shahed 136 missiles into a hangar in Kyiv, where a team of 30 Shield AI employees had been doing research and development just two weeks earlier. The missiles turned the facility into a skeleton of twisted metal and rubble, according to a photo and video footage reviewed by Fortune.
