Natasha Ahmed is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Ahmed is currently the founder of Cosmic Capital Advisory, where she focuses on sovereign strategy and industrial partnerships. In addition, she serves as a senior advisor to TRENDS US, an emerging technology advisor to the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, and a member of the Loudoun County Economic Development Advisory Commission, and she previously served on the board of the Space Force Association’s DC chapter.
Previously, Ahmed led corporate development at Epirus, a directed-energy-based counter-drone company, where her responsibilities spanned corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and capital formation. Earlier, she led defense and space investments at Disruptive, a private equity firm, with transaction experience involving Shield AI, Shift5, and Gecko Robotics, among others. Prior to Disruptive at H4XLabs, she built space and emerging technology programs with SPACEWERX, helping Orbital Prime startups navigate the commercialization of in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing technologies. Her early work in government contracting and two years in Hong Kong working with private capital laid the groundwork for her perspective on government technology adoption, including the challenges of authorization-to-operate processes and how US–China strategic competition shapes the demand for emerging technology and allocation of capital.
Ahmed holds a master’s degree in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two children.