FLEETWERX

A drone demo this summer intended to test capabilities beyond visual line of sight was the latest cooperative effort between S&T and HSWERX. HSWERX, the Homeland Security Innovation Hub, enables S&T to move with a speed and flexibility of collaboration among different types of partners not typical for a government agency. These particular drones were tested to determine whether they could enhance border visibility for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Find out if they were successful: https://lnkd.in/ewRFh5JF #HSWERX #UAS #Drones

The Private Capital Investor Cohort Assessment Event (AE) is now live! Background/Synopsis USSOCOM requires an investor cohort to accelerate capability development across all USSOCOM Program Executive Offices. Focused on SOF contract awardees, participants selected for this investor cohort must understand markets and technologies aligned with SOF interests and have expertise in academic and accelerator services. Understanding that awardee maturity can happen through commercial revenue, Prime partnerships, Phase III contracts, private investment, and other government opportunities, a participant must have expertise on all means to actualize the capability. Objective The objective is to provide a purpose-driven community around accelerating SOF capability development. This Private Capital Investor Cohort (PCIC) will host in-person and virtual events focused on best practices to deliver new capabilities at speed and scale to SOF. #PrivateCapital #InvestorCohort #VentureCapital #StartupFunding #InvestmentOpportunities #AcceleratorPrograms #DefenseInvestment #SOFInnovations #CapabilityDevelopment #StrategicInvestments #TechFunding #DefenseTechnology #MilitaryInnovation #SpecialForcesSupport #InnovationEcosystem #DefenseContracts #GrowthOpportunities #CapitalInvestment #MarketAnalysis #TechnologyScouting #InnovationAcceleration #VenturePartners #FundingRound #EarlyStageInvestors #PrivateCapital #CohortInvesting #InvestorNetwork #VentureCohort #CapitalGrowth #PrivateEquity #StartupCohorts #InvestmentGroups #FundingCohorts #PrivateInvestment #CapitalPartners #InvestorCohorts #CollaborativeFunding #VenturePartners #CapitalAllocation #FundingNetworks #StrategicInvestments #EarlyStageCapital #GrowthCohorts #InvestmentOpportunities

🚨 Yesterday an industry partner emailed me, asking what the ROI is for a small business attending JIFX.🚨   I'm fine with taking a fair bit of risk, if it means moving the ball forward. 😯 So I'm sharing my unplanned, unrehearsed, stream of consciousness email response from yesterday with all of you:   "I’ve talked with a lot of companies, enough to realize that their time and energy is precious and is a limiting factor, so we try hard to make it worth their while. JIFX is not just a demonstration, and it’s definitely not a dog-and-pony show.   There’s a few different ROIs available, depending on what the company needs.     - Access to an operational environment to experiment or collect data to inform the company’s engineering. Some companies don’t have easy access to an airfield and airspace, or have only run their ground sensing algos in the parking lot outside their building. Being able to fly or drive around in a wilderness environment or inside “combat town” is sometimes what a company needs. They take that data and that informs their next engineering step.   - Feedback from end users that make the product more fit for the mission. An autonomous air logistics company was at a JIFX, and the active duty soldier there told them the cargo handles were far too flimsy and in the wrong place for the real world. The company would’ve figured that out on their own eventually, but they fixed the problem a lot sooner with that sort of feedback. The companies get similar insight into whatever mission their product aligns to.    - B2B teaming. This happens all the time, where two companies realize their systems are complementary and they ought to work together. For example, we did a subterranean event where one company had man-portable LIDAR for mapping underground structures, and another had low cost radio repeaters they could stick on the wall to make self-forming networks. The companies realized that the radios could create a data exfil path for the LIDAR, and wrote the code at night to make the things work together. They came back the next day with an integrated system and showed it to the SOF reps who worked in the sub-t mission set. Or, a UAS company decides to share field data during JIFX with a sensor company, to better understand the signature of their UAS and generate ideas to manage the signature.   - Exposure to transition paths. We work to curate the government attendees to emphasize people at the O5/O6/GS14/15 level who are part of an acquisition team. S&T people and CCMD reps are critical too, but service and agency acquisition folks tend to be the gatekeepers on the path to actual revenue, beyond non-dilutive funding like #SBIRs and #STRATFI." 🚨 Always open to reality checks and ideas to make #JIFX more helpful! 🚨

[LINK BELOW] Events like Trident Warrior / Rim of the Pacific 24, give us opportunities to deep dive with our partners like SPEE3D and push these machines to their limits in an operational setting. A HUGE thank you to their team for going above and beyond by providing the onsite technical expertise for their technology, which enabled us to refine our capabilities and processes for conducting expeditionary #advancedmanufacturinng with cold-spray #additivemanufacturing. This collaborative approach, working side-by-side with warfighters, accelerates the learning for students at the Naval Postgraduate School and ultimately delivers better results! https://lnkd.in/g_3knVeg [Left to Right] Mr. Patrick Tucker, FLEETWERX Lt. Col. Michael Radigan, U. S. Marines Lt. Cmdr Zachary Vrtis, PE, U. S. Navy Lt. Ashley-Nicole Adams, U. S. Navy Lt. Andrew Staley, U. S. Navy Photo Credit PO2 Andrew Langholf, U. S. Navy #irttw

SPEE3D completes the US Department of Defense’s Trident Warrior exercise https://lnkd.in/euifFq_G #3dprint #additivemanufacturing #am #technology #maritime #excercise #tridentwarrior #rimpac Michael Radigan Byron Kennedy