Joe Musselman is the Founder and Managing Partner of BVVC, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on national security technologies and the founders building at the intersection of defense, industrial capacity, and American resilience. He is responsible for the firm’s strategic vision and day-to-day mission operations, leads BVVC’s capital, investment, portfolio, and fund operations teams, and chairs the firm’s Investment Committee.
Since 2019, Joe has invested from early seed through early growth across a portfolio that includes companies such as Anduril, Figure, Epirus, X-Bow Systems, Firestorm, Epsilon3, VATN, HavocAI, Tive, and Tern. His investing approach is grounded in a belief that exceptional venture outcomes begin with exceptional service to founders: disciplined work, high accountability, and a willingness to help solve the difficult operating problems that appear between invention and scale.
“The quality of venture outcomes is in direct proportion to the quality of founders we serve over time. Superior founders recognize superior work ethic. This is how we win. True alpha for our fund is grounded in excellence as a service. What we provide founders must be exceptional.”
— Joe Musselman, Founder/BVVC
That philosophy also shaped BVVC’s inception investment in UNION, a manufacturing platform built around the thesis that national security advantage depends not only on the products a country can design, but on its ability to produce them at speed and scale. The investment reflects a broader conviction that the next era of deterrence will require renewed industrial capacity, resilient supply chains, and factories capable of rapidly converting demand signals into output. UNION’s Factory-as-a-Stockpile™ concept grew from this view: that productive capacity itself is a strategic asset.
Joe also led BVVC’s creation and backing of School.House, a platform built to serve national security founders and the broader ecosystem that supports them. Across BVVC’s work, he has focused on assembling an unusually strong network around founders, including institutional investors, technology leaders, family offices, Fortune 100 executives, and cross-sector operators.
Before his institutional investing career, Joe founded and served as CEO of The Honor Foundation, which became a leading career-transition organization for the U.S. Special Operations Forces community. In under five years, he grew the organization into a multi-thousand-person support network. Today, The Honor Foundation operates across multiple campuses and has helped thousands of special operators transition into meaningful post-service careers. Joe later founded an endowment effort designed to support that mission for the long term.
Joe’s own service in the U.S. Navy and Naval Special Warfare shaped his understanding of mission, trust, duty, and team performance. A serious injury ended his pursuit of becoming a Navy SEAL, and he was honorably medically retired in 2013. His family’s military service stretches back to the American Revolution, reinforcing a personal connection to the national security mission that continues to inform his work at BVVC.
Joe has been recognized by global publications for his work as an entrepreneur, investor, and nonprofit founder. He is a graduate of Fenwick High School and DePaul University and has completed additional executive and certificate programs through Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Pepperdine. A classical violinist and graduate of Merit School of Music, he also serves on Merit’s board of directors.
He frequently speaks to funds, firms, foundations, and universities on teams, leadership, and culture, and on the responsibility of investors to serve founders with the same intensity founders bring to building enduring companies. At BVVC, that principle remains central to the firm’s mission: find the toughest builders, protect the mission, and help American national security companies become institutions that matter.