Narya Capital

A Pentagon contract lands on a vice president’s portfolio

In late September 2026, the Pentagon awarded a satellite-surveillance contract to True Anomaly, a defense startup backed by a venture fund in which Vice President J.D. Vance holds a stake worth up to $1 million — plus a right to more than half of the investment profits paid to the fund’s managers (Read Sludge). True Anomaly was one of two companies selected to build prototype satellites for GHOST-R, a Space Force effort to observe and track other spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit; Northrop Grumman received the other award (Read Sludge). The contract values were not disclosed, but successful prototypes have a path into the Space Force’s RG-XX surveillance satellite program (Read Sludge).

That fund is Narya Capital — the Ohio venture firm Vance co-founded in 2019, and the vehicle at the center of his short, sharp career in technology investing (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

Two firms before the firm’s own

Vance moved to the Bay Area shortly after graduating from Yale Law School in 2013 to pursue entrepreneurship, and in 2016 he joined Mithril Capital, the San Francisco firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, as a junior investor (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). He worked at Mithril for about a year — one former colleague said he never once saw Vance in the office, while another remembered seeing him around, noting that he traveled a lot to promote his memoir Hillbilly Elegy; neither remembered significant deals that Vance drove there (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

In March 2017 Vance left Mithril for Revolution, the investment firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case, where he was hired to focus on the Rise of the Rest initiative — a seed fund hunting for investments outside the typical tech ecosystems of Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). Over eighteen months there he was lead partner or co-lead on 14 deals, including the defense-tech startup Anduril Industries, the artificial-intelligence startup Pryon, and the agtech company AppHarvest (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). He left Revolution at the end of 2019 and started Narya with Greenspon (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

Narya itself

Narya Capital was founded in 2019 by J.D. Vance and Colin Greenspon (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). The pair raised $120 million in their first fund, with backing from Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to a person familiar with the fund’s financials (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). That fund generated a multiple on invested capital of 1.67 and an internal rate of return of 24.35% after fees as of March 2023, according to an investor document (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

Since its founding, Narya had made 14 investments, one of them in stealth, the same reporting found — including Rumble, the video platform popular with the political right that went public through a special-purpose acquisition company while Vance was running for the Senate, and Hallow, a Catholic meditation and prayer app (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). Three other investments had ties to Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman who once vied for the Republican presidential nomination and had been Vance’s law-school classmate (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

The AppHarvest arc

The blemish on Vance’s record is AppHarvest, the Kentucky-based indoor-farming tech company — one of his bigger investments, made through two different venture firms (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). Vance invested again in the company through Narya and joined its board in July 2020; other board members included Martha Stewart and investor Jeffrey Ubben (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). In February 2021 AppHarvest went public through a SPAC, and Vance resigned from the board two months later to make his Senate run (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

Months after Vance left the board, AppHarvest was sued by individual investors and a county retirement association in five separate lawsuits alleging the company had misled regulators and investors and failed to disclose adverse facts about its operations, including a lack of employee training and an inability to hire and retain employees (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). The company filed for bankruptcy in mid-2023 (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)).

The exit — and what stayed

Vance left the investing world in 2022 after being elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). His 2022 financials reveal an income of $110,146 from Narya (Livemint (Wall Street Journal)). But he kept his financial stake: his latest annual financial disclosure, which covers 2025, lists an investment worth between $500,001 and $1 million in Narya Capital Fund I, in which he is a general partner (Read Sludge).

The disclosure’s agreements entitle him to “56.4% for the first $7 million of aggregate carried interest proceeds distributed to the entity, and 55.2% thereafter,” plus 60% of the entity’s net fee proceeds and a $525,000 “Management Fee Set Off Contribution” (Read Sludge). If the LLC received $7 million in carried interest, Vance’s share would be nearly $4 million (Read Sludge).

True Anomaly, meanwhile, kept collecting government work: in April it was named one of 14 companies eligible to compete under the Andromeda satellite-surveillance program, which carries a $1.843 billion shared ceiling, and Space Force named it among the companies awarded agreements to develop space-based interceptors for the Golden Dome missile-defense project (Read Sludge). Its $650 million funding round in April itself had named Narya among the investors (Read Sludge).

Two facts stand alongside the numbers. Federal law generally bars executive-branch officials from taking part in matters affecting their financial interests, but the law does not apply to the president or vice president — Vance must disclose his interests but need not sell his Narya stake or recuse himself (Read Sludge). And there is no evidence that he participated in selecting True Anomaly for the GHOST-R contract; neither Vance nor True Anomaly replied to Sludge’s requests for comment (Read Sludge).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not repeat the story that “Narya” was named for Tolkien’s Ring of Fire — that appears only in encyclopedia mirrors this profile did not read. It does not state the TechCrunch-reported $93 million early-2020 raise figure, because the archived page could not be fetched and read; it uses the $120 million Fund I figure from the investor document cited by the Wall Street Journal’s reporting instead. It does not say whether the firm has raised or is raising a second fund, does not pin the headquarters city, and does not give current portfolio valuations. It does not claim Vance participated in True Anomaly’s contract selection — the sources it read say there is no evidence he did. Where the records vary or fall silent, the profile says so rather than filling the gap.