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From paper routes to fighter jets: Shield AI’s bet on Seattle is a homecoming for its co-founders

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From paper routes to fighter jets: Shield AI’s bet on Seattle is a homecoming for its co-founders

As a kid on Mercer Island, Brandon Tseng delivered The Seattle Times and the Mercer Island Reporter for extra cash. Now he and his older brother, Ryan Tseng, are making news of their own in the Seattle region.

Shield AI, the San Diego defense tech company the brothers co-founded in 2015, announced a deal last week to buy Kirkland, Wash.-based radar maker Echodyne for up to $5.3 billion. Shield, now valued at $28.8 billion, had already unveiled plans in September to build its AI-piloted X-BAT fighter jet at a factory south of Seattle.

“I believe we will become one of the largest, or at least the fastest-growing employer in this region over the next several years,” Brandon Tseng said in an interview with GeekWire in the hours after the Echodyne acquisition was announced.

The company projects that it will employ about 4,000 people in the Seattle area by the early 2030s. It estimates the X-BAT could support about 8,000 jobs across the region in all, including jobs at Shield and its suppliers, according to an economic analysis drawing on company figures.

Tseng said Shield expects to have “well north of a million square feet” in the area before long, up from its initial 420,000-square-foot facility in Des Moines, Wash.

Brandon Tseng said the biggest reason Shield chose the Pacific Northwest for X-BAT production was the region’s “density of engineering and manufacturing talent,” pointing to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon.

Inside the Echodyne deal: Shield believes the defense tech companies that succeed will need products that “sense, think, and act,” Tseng said.


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