Matthew Strottman

Matthew Strottman is the Chief Operating Officer of In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit strategic investor created in 1999 to identify and adapt cutting-edge commercial technology for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the broader national-security community. He joined IQT in 2003 and has spent more than two decades there, rising through the organization's investment and finance leadership. As COO he is responsible for investment and portfolio analysis as well as IQT's corporate functions — finance, accounting, IT, human resources, and security — and, per IQT descriptions, its technology-transfer and engineering operations.

Before becoming COO, Strottman served as IQT's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and earlier as Senior Director of Investment Analysis, where he managed the vetting and due diligence of prospective investments and tracked the financial performance and valuations of the portfolio. That progression — from deal analysis to CFO to COO — reflects a career centered on the investment mechanics and financial discipline of a highly unusual, mission-return (rather than financial-return) fund.

Prior to IQT, Strottman worked in the Technology Investment Banking Group at Friedman Billings Ramsey (FBR), where he executed public and private equity financings, mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, and venture-capital transactions totaling more than $3 billion. He began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, focused primarily on the real-estate and technology industries.

Strottman holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Georgetown University. He has also served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), reflecting his standing in the greater Washington, D.C. technology community.

• IQT invests to advance mission impact for the U.S. intelligence and defense community — success is measured by adoption of technology by government partners, not by financial return. Founders should expect a strategic, not purely financial, investor.
• Focus is on frontier and dual-use technologies: AI/ML, cybersecurity, quantum, biotech, space, advanced materials, and data analytics.
• IQT typically pairs a modest equity investment with a work program / technology-development agreement, giving startups the intelligence community as an early, credible reference customer.
• Over ~25 years IQT has backed 800+ startups; it seeks early-stage companies whose commercial roadmap can be steered toward concrete government needs.
• The value proposition is access and validation as much as capital — a small check (Palantir's was ~$2M) that unlocks government users and signals credibility to later commercial and private investors.