After notching early success, Darkhive CEO shares lessons learned with San Antonio startups

It was 2021, and John Goodson faced an inflection point in his career.

He had spent the last two and a half years at CTI, a small software and systems development company that provides technologies for the U.S. military. Goodson had worn many hats in his time there, learning the arcane ins and outs of the defense contracting business.

When the company sought a private equity partner to provide the capital necessary for major growth, Goodson and a colleague, Steve Turner, had to make a decision: stay and grow, or strike out on their own.

At that point, Goodson said, “Steve and I had worked on just about every type of program or project you can work on in the Department of Defense, from systems integration on crewed aircraft, uncrewed systems, application development [of] both mobile and web-based apps, data processing and machine learning.”

They left CTI, but without a clear idea of what problem they wanted to tackle. Goodson found that by returning to San Diego, where he had separated from the U.S. Navy in 2016. At the time, he had been working in a unit that provides support to the Navy’s West Coast SEAL team.

He and Turner sought to uncover the SEAL team’s biggest pain points, whether processes or tools, and eventually landed on a problem Goodson had experienced firsthand in Southern Afghanistan — working with large and unwieldy drones.

Today, Goodson is CEO and Turner is the chief technical officer of San Antonio-based Darkhive, which is developing a small, inexpensive autonomous drone for military and public safety use. The company also has expanded into related software development.

On Tuesday, Goodson hosted a panel at San Antonio Startup Week on how to get a defense tech startup going, just a week after Darkhive announced it had been awarded a $1.25 million contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to advance a voice-enabled command and control system for smartphone-based technology used by the military for tactical information feeds, various analytics and visualizations.

Last month, Darkhive secured four additional contracts worth almost $5 million with AFWERX, part of the Air Force Research Lab, to develop “resilient, low-cost autonomous drone swarming technologies.”