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Tag: artificial intelligence

Engineering without boundaries

The surging demand for energy.

The country’s aging, overwhelmed electrical grid. Threats of cyberattacks. The explosion of interest in — and confusion about — artificial intelligence.

These real-life problems don’t know boundaries. Neither should the search for solutions, says Azim Eskandarian, dean of Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Engineering.

Cross-disciplinary learning is the way of the future and VCU’s engineering school is setting itself up to be that kind of learning institution, says Eskandarian, who advocates for what he calls “engineering without boundaries.”

In a move to break down walls between disciplines and qualify students for high-demand jobs, the college has added six new minors for undergraduates: artificial intelligence, aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, software engineering, cybersecurity, and data science. These minors became available at the beginning of the 2024-25 academic year.

What makes the addition of these minors so valuable is that engineering “has become a more interdisciplinary field that requires at least a basic understanding of principles from a variety of industries,” says John R. Harrell, Dominion Energy’s director of nuclear engineering and fuel department.

Richmond-based Dominion, which runs four nuclear reactors in Surry and Louisa counties and is taking steps toward potentially developing a small nuclear modular reactor at the North Anna Power Station, relies on VCU engineering graduates to fill a wide range of positions, including mechanical design engineer, electric transmission engineer, nuclear core design engineer and nuclear spent fuels engineer.

“Knowledge of nuclear power generation could be beneficial to an electrical engineer working on the power grid. A deeper understanding of nuclear energy can enable them to find better and more efficient solutions for Dominion Energy,” says Harrell, a member of VCU’s nuclear engineering advisory board.

Having expertise in more than one engineering discipline allows new hires “to rotate between roles on a team that might have been unavailable to a specialist,” he adds.

The engineering college teaches nearly 2,000 undergraduate students and approximately 300 graduate students who are pursuing degrees in everything from biomedical engineering through nuclear engineering.

In addition to the new minor focuses, the college has six new master’s concentrations in aerospace engineering, engineering management, environmental and sustainable engineering, rehabilitation engineering, systems engineering, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.

Eskandarian describes VCU’s engineering curriculum as focused and unusual. “We don’t have programs in industrial or civil engineering — we don’t have that traditional type of program.” 

“Every graduate of VCU should have a chance to get educated in data science and AI,” says Preetam Ghosh, interim chair of VCU’s Department of Computer Science. Photo courtesy Virginia Commonwealth University

Nuclear option

The new nuclear engineering minor helps VCU address the ever-expanding need for education relating to nuclear power reactors, shipbuilding and medical isotopes, according to John Speich, interim chair and professor of VCU’s Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering.

The demand for sustainable energy has spurred interest in small modular reactors (SMRs), which have a lower initial capital investment, greater scalability and a smaller physical footprint than traditional reactors, allowing them to be built closer to the grid.

In July, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill aimed at accelerating the deployment of SMRs in Virginia. Dominion Energy followed up with requests for proposals to study the feasibility of an SMR at North Anna. In October, Dominion Energy Virginia signed an agreement with Amazon.com to explore potential development of SMRs, with Amazon helping finance the move.

Only two SMRs are currently in operation worldwide, officials note, and Virginia likely wouldn’t have its own small reactor until at least the mid-2030s.

The new minor, says Supathorn Phongikaroon, engineering foundation professor and director of nuclear engineering programs at VCU, will help expand the pool of scientific talent available in Virginia. “We want … to involve and include people who often think this is an extremely difficult area” and shy away from it, he says.

For example, he says, students majoring in electrical engineering could add the minor to enable them to better explore possible nuclear-power solutions to the U.S.’s growing demand for energy, largely attributed to expanding digital use and data center growth.

Five or six students are already taking the nuclear engineering minor. The intro class typically has about 30 students, but about 40 are enrolled this fall, Phongikaroon says.

VCU offers students a wealth of opportunities to research various aspects of nuclear power. Its Nuclear Reactor Simulator Laboratory is home to the GSE Solutions GPWR (Generic Pressurized Water Reactor) nuclear reactor simulator, which mimics the behavior of a nuclear reactor like those at Dominion’s power stations that heat water to create steam and drive an electric generator.

This gives students hands-on experience with nuclear plants’ operations and lets them learn how to handle unanticipated events.

“It can simulate an entire power plant,” Eskandarian says, which allows researchers to study a range of issues, including sustainability and potential safety hazards.

VCU also is involved in research at the Center of Operational Excellence for Nuclear Products and Services in Lynchburg and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The university’s work has been honored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others.

The nuclear engineering minor also is valuable in the nuclear Navy and the shipbuilding industry, Speich says.

Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, is one of two primary designers and builders of nuclear-powered submarines for the U.S. Navy. And it is currently building the Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the first new aircraft carrier design in decades.

VCU has many nuclear and mechanical engineering alumni at Newport News Shipbuilding, as well as other big employers like nuclear fuel maker BWX Technologies and nuclear reactor builder Framatome in Lynchburg, Speich notes, and “we have representatives from these companies on our advisory boards.”

Other options are in the study of medical isotopes, an essential part of radiopharmaceuticals that are used to detect diagnosis and treat cardiovascular diseases and cancer, according to Phongikaroon.

In 2023, the Energy Department awarded a VCU-led team a $5 million grant to develop a more efficient method of isotope production, and researchers from VCU, Virginia State University and Virginia Union University are forming a consortium with the Oak Ridge laboratory to train 70 undergraduate and graduate students in all aspects of isotope production.

The next frontier

Nuclear energy isn’t the only hot area of research. VCU engineering master’s students have the option for a concentration in aerospace engineering, which prompted the idea of offering a minor to undergraduates.

The demand for education in the field certainly has been strong, according to Speich. “When we have open houses, people ask if we have aerospace.” VCU students are active in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics professional society and in RAM Rocketry, which provides experience in the field of rocketry and aerospace design through student rocketry competitions.

The minor will be useful to engineering students seeking jobs related to the design, manufacture and testing of airplanes, helicopters, drones, rockets, spacecraft or satellites, Speich says. So far, “we have at least a dozen in this minor,” he says. One student who had already begun taking electives, “will be graduating in December.”

Having already offered aerospace courses, VCU can cite an impressive list of employers its engineering grads have gone on to, including NASA, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Artificial intelligence is also another popular area of study, Eskandarian says — “perhaps the hottest topic now. It’s on the news all the time.”

This new minor covers the essentials of AI technology, with a selection of courses that delve into topics such as machine learning, natural language processing and the ethical considerations of AI.

According to a survey of 300 U.S. and U.K. organizations conducted by Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, 56% of software engineering leaders rated AI/machine learning engineer as the most in-demand role for 2024, as well as the biggest skills gap.

While perhaps not quite as red-hot as AI is currently, VCU’s minors in data science, cybersecurity and software engineering are also promising fields for future employment.

All types of businesses want employees who know how to handle data, says Eskandarian, and the data science minor  is primarily for students majoring in computer science and mathematical sciences with a concentration in statistics.

This interdisciplinary field combines expertise in statistics, computer science and domain-specific knowledge to extract insights and knowledge from data, according to Preetam Ghosh, a professor and interim chair for the engineering college’s Department of Computer Science.

Ghosh’s department is the largest in the college, offering courses on AI, cybersecurity, high-performance data mining and machine learning, among other fields. Data science is used in all of them, Ghosh says. “Every graduate of VCU should have a chance to get educated in data science and AI. Every job needs some type of data and AI, even arts majors.”

As for the cybersecurity minor, it’s open to non-computer science majors and gives them valuable troubleshooting skills that let them identify hacking weaknesses and correct problems. The student may not be qualified to create a cyber defense product, Ghosh says, but “it covers the basics” such as blockchain technology, a method of recording information that makes it difficult for the system to be hacked or manipulated.

As for software engineering, Ghosh says it’s a mainstay for the IT industry, where “the demand is more than the supply. These are good jobs with security.”

The minor is meant to provide students with an understanding of software life cycles; architecture and design patterns; agile software development; and maintenance and testing methodologies. Students also learn about how to collaborate in large software development teams.

Many software jobs don’t need to be filled by someone who has majored in the field, Ghosh adds. It could be an art student or a marketing major. “We’re creating new pathways for students from different backgrounds. We’ve democratized software engineering.”

Eskandarian sees all of these new minors as critical to meeting the needs of students and companies in Virginia. “We want to produce student leader engineers that are serving the market.”

 

VCU at a glance

Founded

Virginia Commonwealth University was founded in 1838 as the Medical College of Hampden-Sydney and was later renamed the Medical College of Virginia. In 1968, MCV merged with Richmond Professional Institute to form VCU.

Campus

VCU has two campuses in downtown Richmond covering a total of 198 acres. The Monroe Park Campus houses most undergraduate students and classes. VCU’s five health sciences schools, the College of Health Professions, VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and VCU Health are located on the MCV campus.

Enrollment

Undergraduate: 21,548
Graduate: 5,550
First professional: 1,496
International: 1,030
In-state: 86%
Minority: 55%

Employees
25,359*

Faculty

Full-time faculty: 2,457
Full-time university and academic professionals: 3,675

Tuition and fees

In-state tuition and fees: $16,720**
Tuition and fees (out of state): $39,884**
Room and board and other fees: $14,268***

Average financial aid awarded to full-time freshmen seeking assistance: $20,261

* Includes VCU and VCU Health

** Based on 15 credit hours per semester and 30 credit hours for the 2024-25 year. This does not include program fees, which vary based on a student’s major.

*** Room charge is based on a double occupancy in Rhoads Hall, and the dining rate is for the 200 swipes with $225 dining dollars meal plan for the 2024-25 year.

Unanet acquires D.C. AI firm

Dulles-based software company Unanet has acquired Washington, D.C.-based GovPro AI, Unanet announced Friday.

Unanet did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which it completed in November.

Unanet provides project-based enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software solutions for government contractors and the architecture, engineering and construction industries. GovPro AI provides AI-powered proposal writing platforms for government contractors.

“Unanet is continuing to deliver on its promise to solve real business challenges for our customers,” Unanet Chief Innovation Officer Steve Karp said in a statement. “In addition to helping customers across the GovCon and AEC industries respond to RFPs more efficiently, GovPro AI’s technology and team will accelerate Unanet’s broader AI strategy.”

GovPro AI’s platform creates a first proposal draft for responding to federal requests for proposals. With the platform, government contractors can reduce the average time to create a proposal draft by 70% and can halve proposal generation costs, according to a news release.

Unanet plans to extend the tech into the architecture, engineering and construction market in 2025.

“Being part of the Unanet team means we can advance our innovation and refine the solution features,” GovPro AI founder Alexander Cohen said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to exploring new use cases for customers and continuing to deliver a more efficient, modern way of improving business development.”

With about 375 employees, Unanet has more than 4,000 customers.

Defense tech startups close major funding rounds

Venture capital firms are betting big on two Northern Virginia-based defense contracting startups that are promising high-tech solutions to military challenges. In August, McLean-based Defcon AI announced it had raised $44 million in seed funding led by San Francisco investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners. The same month, Parry Labs in Alexandria raised $80 million in its first institutional funding round, led by Capitol Meridian Partners.

That both are headquartered in NoVa should come as no surprise, says Defcon AI CEO Yisroel Brumer, a quantum physicist who spent 15 years at the Pentagon before becoming a founding partner of Defcon AI’s parent tech incubator, Red Cell Partners. “The quality of senior leaders in the area is outstanding,” he says. 

Red Cell launched Defcon AI in 2022 to address the Department of Defense’s need to field operational artificial intelligence at scale to maintain advantages on the battlefield. Defcon’s first product is Artiv, an operational mission planner for contested logistics environments.

“There is a challenge integrating real operational defense expertise with real revolutionary software engineering. There’s a lot of organizations that have one of those two things. Very few organizations have both of them,” Brumer says. “And that’s what Defcon was really stood up to do: to bring in four-star generals, operators, people who deeply understand defense operations and the kind of revolutionary software engineering you see in Silicon Valley and create a culture where the two could talk to each other, which is actually the hard part and where the pain is.”

Meanwhile, Parry Labs was co-founded in 2015 by defense sector veteran-turned-entrepreneur John “JD” Parkes, who previously worked as airborne mission lead in the DOD’s Office of Strategic Capabilities.

“We wanted to make integrating and installing and implementing new software and systems on military applications significantly cheaper and faster. Today we call that or call ourselves a digital system integrator,” Parkes says. “What we’re focused on is delivering zero-trust cybersecurity environments over-the-air updates, really good standardization of data, and then easy accessibility to these environments for mission and safety critical environments.” 

The two companies are contributing to a record-breaking year in which defense tech startups in the U.S. raised $2.5 billion by August, according to data from Crunchbase.com. That figure surpasses the 2023 total of $2.1 billion and is on track to surpass 2022’s record high of $2.6 billion.

As data centers grow, Amazon and Dominion explore small nuclear reactors

With power consumption by data centers and AI projected to more than quadruple in Virginia in the next 15 years, Amazon.com and Dominion Energy Virginia have entered into an agreement to explore potential development of small modular nuclear reactors at North Anna Power Plant in Louisa County, the two companies announced at an event Wednesday at Amazon’s HQ2 East Coast headquarters in Arlington County.

Dominion and Amazon’s memorandum of understanding means the companies will “jointly explore innovative ways to advance SMR development and financing while also mitigating potential cost and development risks for customers and capital providers,” according to Dominion’s announcement.

“This is a milestone along the path,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said at Wednesday’s event. “There’s a ton that we need to do between here and there, and there’s a lot of work that needs to go into this, but this is a really important milestone that we’re celebrating today.”

At Wednesday morning’s event, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner and Dominion Energy Virginia President Ed Baine were on hand, among other state and national dignitaries.

“I am thrilled that Virginia is among the first states to take this big step,” Youngkin said. “Just two-and-a-half years ago, Virginia was literally accelerating on what has been an uninterrupted renaissance in growth, job growth and investment by companies who’ve committed $83 billion to expand or come to Virginia, and hire more people than we’ve ever had working before in the history of the commonwealth.”

He noted that the state is “poised to take this giant step with our partners,” as home to the nuclear Navy, multiple research universities and Dominion.

In his comments, Kaine also mentioned Lynchburg-based nuclear fuel producer BWX Technologies and Framatome Inc., the North American subsidiary of the French nuclear equipment, services and fuel producer, as other significant players in Virginia’s nuclear energy sector. “Amazon is the largest power user in the United States,” Kaine said. “That AWS is here, and that AWS is endeavoring to help us advance our innovation together with these other innovators in Virginia makes perfect sense.”

As of now, only two SMRs are in operation — one in Russia and the other in China — and Virginia likely won’t have its own SMR before the mid-2030s.

Warner, who chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, said Wednesday that energy innovation is important also as a matter of national security, particularly as the U.S. races to catch up with China’s innovations. “National security is not simply the nation state that has the most tanks and guns and ships and planes, but increasingly, it’s going to be who can win the battle in technology competition.” China, he added, is constructing “30 nuclear plants even as we speak. They have a goal of adding 150 more by 2035.”

However, he said, Virginia is “the nuclear capital for the country,” with 100,000 people already working in the nuclear sector in the commonwealth, including sailors, university researchers and employees at BWXT, Framatome, Huntington Ingalls Industries and other companies.

Ambitious plans

Amazon’s agreement with Dominion was just part of its news Wednesday, as the global e-tail giant announced it has signed three agreements to support development of small modular reactors, or SMRs, including one in the state of Washington with Energy Northwest, to develop four advanced SMRs. According to Amazon’s announcement, the four reactors would generate roughly 960 megawatts of electricity at full operation, beginning in the early 2030s. Amazon, which in March acquired a nuclear-powered data center campus in Pennsylvania from Talen Energy, also has committed to invest in SMR developer X-energy, whose reactor design will be used in the Energy Northwest project.

“Nuclear is a safe source of carbon-free energy that can help power our operations and meet the growing demands of our customers, while helping us progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operation by 2040,” Garman said in a statement released Wednesday morning.

Dominion previously announced in July that it had issued a request for proposals to evaluate the feasibility for a small nuclear reactor to be developed at its North Anna power plant, where it has two conventional, large nuclear reactors. Nuclear technology companies received the RFP, which was not a guarantee to build an SMR but would be the first step in exploring whether such a step was feasible, the Fortune 500 utility said in July.

On Wednesday, Dominion Energy Virginia’s Baine said that the “site is well on its way to be able to be developed,” and that he expects Dominion to make a decision on the winning proposal before the end of the year. He also said that X-energy is among the companies that have submitted a proposal.

The RFP, Baine added, will “inform us how we want to move forward with companies for additional small modular reactors as well.”

Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick said Wednesday that she expects Youngkin to soon issue an executive order about accelerating permitting for nuclear sites, and the state has invited X-energy to come to Virginia for manufacturing.

Competitor Google preempted Amazon’s announcement by a day, announcing on Tuesday that the tech company had reached an agreement with Kairos Power to develop and purchase 500 megawatts of power from six to seven SMRs, planned to come online between 2030 and 2035. And in September, Microsoft forged a deal with Constellation Energy to offset power consumption by its data centers by reviving a portion of the Three Mile Island power plant, the Pennsylvania facility that in 1979 experienced a partial nuclear meltdown, the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history.

Moving toward nuclear in Va.

Over the past couple of years, SMRs have been a big part of Virginia’s energy conversation, especially as data center growth has put more demands on the state’s power grid.

According to Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan, filed Tuesday with the Virginia State Corporation Commission and the North Carolina Utilities Commission, power demand in Dominion’s coverage area in Virginia and North Carolina is expected to grow 5.5% annually over the next decade and double by 2039. Dominion has previously predicted that the data center industry in the state will demand 13 gigawatts of electricity by 2038, nearly five times the 2.8 gigawatts it used in 2023.

In Virginia, Amazon has agreed to explore the development of an SMR project near North Anna, bringing “at least 300 megawatts of power to the Virginia region, where Dominion projects that power demands will increase by 85% over the next 15 years,” according to Amazon’s news release. Additionally, Amazon signed an agreement to place a new data center next to a nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, a carbon-free energy source to power the data center.

In Loudoun County’s Ashburn area, where more than 70% of the world’s internet traffic courses through a corridor known as Data Center Alley, Amazon Web Services is the biggest fish in a gigantic pool. From 2011 to 2021, AWS invested more than $51.9 billion in Virginia, including building data centers. In January 2023, the company had at least 65 data centers in Loudoun in operation or under development, out of more than 200 data centers in the county, and AWS announced it planned to invest $35 billion by 2040 to build more data center campuses across the state.

Nationally, it’s anticipated that data centers will account for 17% of energy usage nationwide by 2030, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report. That’s up from 4% in 2022 and 6% in 2026, according to data and projections from the International Energy Agency.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, speaking at Wednesday’s event, called Virginia “the go-to place for the concentration of data centers,” and noted that AWS is the latest company to do “BYOP,” or “bring your own power” for data centers. “And this is the important piece I mentioned, that the technology companies know that in order for these data centers to achieve great community buy-in, bringing their own power with them is an important piece of that, so the rates are not raised on everyday citizens.”

She added that the Department of Energy is announcing $900 million in funding “for those who want to deploy even more … small modular reactors,” referring to applications opening for a program to support the first commercial-use SMR in the United States.

In the past couple of years, as artificial intelligence usage and overall digital use has grown, so has demand on Virginia’s power supply. In a May earnings call, Dominion Energy CEO Bob Blue said that the utility is receiving more requests to power larger data center campuses with larger energy demands of 60 to 90 megawatts per building, or several gigawatts for multibuilding campuses.

Baine said in an interview Wednesday that “there are a number of things that are driving energy demand within Virginia. Data centers [are] absolutely one of the big ones, but there’s also manufacturer electrification that is also increasing demand.”

The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) is conducting a study on data centers as some state legislators are pushing for high-volume power users to cover infrastructure costs to keep the state’s power grid reliable. The Virginia General Assembly forwarded all data center-related bills to 2025’s session so lawmakers could take JLARC’s study — expected to be released in November — into consideration.

Freelance writer Courtney Mabeus-Brown and Virginia Business Editor Richard Foster contributed to this story.

A smart defense

In late 2020, the Air Force made headlines when it announced that an artificial intelligence co-pilot, named ARTUµ, helped command and control a U.S. military spy plane for the first time in history.

If the name, pronounced R-2, sounds familiar, it is. Think R2-D2, or “Artoo,” Luke Skywalker’s lovable droid and X-Wing copilot from the “Star Wars” franchise. Except this was not a galaxy far away, but Beale Air Force Base in California.

ARTUµ controlled sensors and tactical navigation of a U-2 Dragon Lady on a reconnaissance training mission out of Beale on Dec. 15, 2020. It was charged with searching for enemy missile launchers while the plane’s human pilot, known only by the call sign “Vudu,” searched for enemy aircraft during a simulated missile strike.

The tech, developed by McLean-based Fortune 500 contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and Air Force researchers, modified an open-source gaming algorithm and ran more than 1 million training simulations in a lab — a “digital Dagobah,” Will Roper, who then served as the service’s assistant secretary for acquisition technology and logistics, wrote in an editorial for Popular Mechanics. ARTUµ was mission-ready in just over a month.

“Failing to realize AI’s full potential will mean ceding decision advantage to our adversaries,” Roper said at the time. 

Fast-forward four years and AI’s technological advancements have continued, transforming lives and — controversially — livelihoods as it becomes more entrenched in the workplace. At the same time, the military has continued to cite how critical AI will remain in helping the U.S. outpace its adversaries. Even as the Pentagon faces ongoing tensions in the Middle East amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and in Europe with Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, military leaders are refocusing for the potential of a wide-ranging battle with China in the Pacific that would most likely unfold across sea, air, land, space and cyberspace.

Virginia’s defense contractors are at the cusp of that work, with a hand in some of the largest and most transformative AI projects on behalf of the military. Those range from warfighting tools like unmanned vehicles to generative AI software to perform mundane business support tasks like military personnel record searches. That’s work that could be game changing for the military at a time when budgets and manpower are tight and harnessing data could be key to maintaining the upper hand against an adversary.

“We try to focus on mission meets
innovation,” says Holly Levanto, who is overseeing delivery of AI and digital solutions for Booz Allen Hamilton’s defense clients. Photo by Shannon Ayres

“I think that the eye is on the prize … when it comes to [the Department of Defense] right now, from the perspective of this is something we have to do from a national security point of view based on threats that we see from other nation states,” says Jason Payne, chief technology officer for Arlington County-based Microsoft Federal, which currently has a contract worth as much as $21.9 billion to produce more than 100,000 AI-enhanced goggles for the Army. “We know that near-peer competitors are investing heavily in this technology.”

Crunching data

The Pentagon is also investing heavily in AI technology. Its fiscal 2025 budget request, which totals $850 billion and was released in March, includes $1.8 billion for AI spending as well as an additional $1.4 billion for the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control project, an ambitious departmentwide effort to connect “sensors to shooters to targets” globally.

But those dollar figures, the Pentagon admits, don’t likely tell the full story. With AI involved in so many programs, the Pentagon’s comptroller has acknowledged it’s difficult to provide a detailed breakdown of its AI investments. Even pinning down the exact number of AI defense projects is challenging. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the DOD had at least 685 ongoing AI projects spanning the military service — a figure based on procurement and research and development dollars.

While those numbers may not offer a ton of clarity on the scope to which the Pentagon is looking toward AI, they do underscore the importance of it for the military, and Virginia contractors are benefiting from that desire.

Booz Allen Hamilton bills itself as the largest supplier of AI services to the federal government, with more than 300 active projects involving AI, according to Holly Levanto, a vice president overseeing the delivery of AI and digital solutions for Booz Allen’s U.S. defense clients.

“We try to focus on mission meets innovation,” Levanto says.

That work has included some of the Pentagon’s largest AI projects to date, including an $800 million, five-year task order awarded in 2020 to integrate and develop AI for the warfighter in the Alliant 2 Joint Warfighter Task Order, as well as a $885 million, five-year task order awarded in 2018 to help the DOD sift through its enormous amount of reconnaissance data — a project called Enterprise Machine Learning Analytics and Persistent Services, or eMAPS — through the deployment of AI and neural and deep neural networks. Booz Allen won a $1.5 billion recompete for the project in 2022.

Focusing on those mission areas has meant incorporating AI in ways to parse data faster. As an example, the Navy gathers vast amounts of data from its ships, Levanto says. Booz Allen has turned raw naval message traffic into tabular data that can be more easily and quickly analyzed to pinpoint trends. 

“We can send AI models to the edge at the point of data collection,” says Levanto, a former naval surface warfare officer. “And so, we have some real-world scenarios where we’ve done that in points on the battlefield.”

Booz Allen also launched a venture capital fund in 2022 to sharpen its tech capabilities. It has now invested in 10 companies, eight of which are AI-focused, Levanto says. That included an investment in Wisconsin-based RAIC Labs, which developed a model- generating platform using unstructured data. In 2023, RAIC made headlines when its tech was used to track a Chinese intelligence balloon that traveled over the U.S. before being shot down by a military jet off the coast of South Carolina.

“Our ultimate goal is to get the Department of Defense to be able to utilize these leading commercial technologies … and so we need to help bridge that,” Levanto says.

Falls Church-based General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of Reston-based Fortune Global 500 aerospace and defense contractor General Dynamics, is also no stranger to big defense contracts involving AI, or those that involve wrangling large sets of data.

In March, GDIT received a $922 million contract to modernize enterprise IT infrastructure for U.S. Central Command, which directs and enables U.S. and allied military operations across the Middle East and a portion of Africa.

Data is the biggest barrier to AI, says GDIT’s Brandon Bean, the AI and machine learning leader for the company’s defense division. That includes data quality and integrity as well as accessing old, siloed IT architectures. Where it used to be that applications were built to create data as a byproduct, the paradigm has shifted. Now, data “is what the application is built to support,” Bean says. “The data comes first.”

At a September conference hosted by GDIT at Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters, John Hale, chief of cloud services for the Defense Information Systems Agency, discussed how DOD is working with contractors to update antiquated computer code with AI.

“We’re using AI capabilities to … modernize legacy code that all the people who ever wrote it are long gone,” Hale said. “And you know, it’s not perfect, but it gets us like 85 to 90% of the way there, and then we’re able to manually fill in that last 10 to 15% to bring these applications into the 21st century.”

For CENTCOM, GDIT is tasked with creating data analytical services to support decision-making across nearly 20 networks and building data centricity and literacy across the command. By leveraging AI, including incorporating data tagging, what has previously required a more tedious process of manual data sampling of mountains of records can be extrapolated much faster, giving commanders the potential to better evaluate what worked during missions, or develop trainings based on lessons learned. It could also help service members to prove justifications for injuries that may not have been recorded in their medical records, Bean says.

AI in the cockpit

While AI is helping the Defense Department wrangle large amounts of data for higher level decision-making, the Pentagon is also incorporating AI in weapons systems and for operational use by warfighters. And that tech is getting increasingly advanced.

In May, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who has advocated for the military’s use of AI, rode in an F-16 Fighting Falcon that was controlled by AI in a dogfight exercise against another F-16 flown by a human. Relying on sensors, California-based Shield AI developed the program used by the Air Force during the flight. In March, Arlington County-based Boeing announced a collaboration with Shield AI to develop autonomous and AI technologies for defense programs. Boeing declined to comment for this story.

With AI in the cockpit, the technology shows no signs of slowing down, including in a variety of unmanned vehicles, which will be a key component in future battles, with several drone initiatives underway by the Pentagon and military branches.

At Newport News-based Huntington Ingalls Industries, Virginia’s largest industrial employer and the nation’s only builder of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, computer vision and recognition technologies have improved to the point where autonomous undersea vehicles like the company’s REMUS platform can be used to hunt for targets, gather intelligence and respond to findings without having to report back to the surface, says Andrew Howard, senior director of unmanned surface vehicles and autonomy programs within HII’s Mission Technologies division.

“Based on … customer comfort with things, different use cases, they could either update its survey pattern based on that information, or they could use that as the cue to pass information back to a surface operator to … take action based on that,” Howard says. “So, it’s really kind of made the information a bit more actionable than it used to be.”

The Navy in December 2023 announced that it had successfully launched and recovered a REMUS “Yellow Moray” drone via torpedo tubes on the USS Delaware, a Virginia-class attack submarine commissioned in 2022 and built by HII in partnership with General Dynamics’ Connecticut-based Electric Boat subsidiary. The Navy has said it could field the program for its submarine fleet later this year.

Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has been testing similar surface-level technology for its Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel (LRUSV) program using technology developed by HII that uses cameras and machine learning to identify and classify targets for maritime domain awareness, Howard adds. The drone’s tech passes intelligence to an operations center for action. Based on that feedback, the drone can then update its mission and shadow an intended target if called upon to act.

Gathering intelligence with less risk to warfighters can help save lives. Making that information more readily available can make work easier, too.

Reston-based Fortune 1000 contractor CACI International offers the DarkBlue Intelligence Suite, a tool that incorporates various AI techniques, including computer vision and image processing, to help analysts in dark web investigations and tracking. The company received a $239 million six-year task order in August to provide intelligence analysis and operations, including the DarkBlue suite, to the Army’s Europe and Africa command.

AI is also helping the Marines step into the metaverse. In October 2023, Fairfax’s CGI Federal, the U.S.-based arm of the Canadian professional services and consultancy, announced that it successfully completed a $34 million pilot to digitally twin the Florida-based Marine Corps Platform Integration Center’s assets into a virtual world by tagging its inventory and helping the service track its assets in real time. Being able to keep up with equipment like tanks as they travel the world could be of huge importance in a distributed battle across the Pacific, where troops could set up on airfields constructed on austere island chains. It could also help the service track maintenance needs and predict trends across vehicle fleets, says CGI Vice President Stephanie Ackman, who leads the company’s technology practice for defense, space and intelligence clients. 

“When the rubber meets the road … [does a taxpayer] care about where the stuff is?” Ackman asks. “Yes, but they care more so about the safety of the individuals that are down range.”  

CGI Federal to acquire Vienna government contractor

CGI Federal, the U.S. arm of Montreal-based IT and professional services consultancy CGI, announced this week it plans to acquire Aeyon, a Vienna-based federal IT consulting firm. The purchase, for which terms were not disclosed, is expected to close by the end of September. 

With 725 employees, Aeyon has been owned by Enlightenment Capital, a Maryland investment firm that invests in middle-market companies in aerospace, defense, government and technology. The parties entered into the acquisition agreement on June 22, according to the announcement. 

CGI Federal officials noted the purchase will complement and expand its relationships with critical national security clients, multiple branches and agencies of the U.S. military, the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA.

Pending regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of CGI’s fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30. 

“We look forward to welcoming the 725 Aeyon employees whose deep experience and expertise in government transformation has meaningfully contributed to the missions of U.S. federal government organizations,” CGI Federal President Stephanie Mango said in a statement. In June, CGI Federal won a place on an $8 billion contract to modernize the FBI’s IT systems. 

“By joining forces with CGI, our clients will benefit significantly from their access to new and complementary global capabilities, greater scale and opportunities to enhance and broaden their mission impact; and for our employees the opportunities to advance their careers with an industry leader are also significant,” Aeyon President and CEO Sunny Singh said. “We are thrilled to combine our capabilities, strengthen our offerings and advance our history of delivering innovative, trusted digital transformation, data and intelligent automation services and solutions to our clients.”

Aeyon was started in 2021 as an Enlightenment Capital portfolio company, when Artlin Consulting and Sehlke Consulting merged.

The parent company CGI has more than 90,000 employees at 80 offices in the United States and 400 locations worldwide, and it reported revenue of $10.4 billion for fiscal 2023, an 11.1% increase over 2022. 

Leidos names first chief AI officer

Leidos has named Ron Keesing its first chief AI officer, the Reston Fortune 500 contractor announced Tuesday. 

Keesing, who joined Leidos in 2004, has more than two decades of experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics. His roles have included serving as founding director of the Leidos AI Accelerator and as senior vice president of technology integration, responsible for “driving mission-critical AI as a core discriminator of the company’s data-driven solutions.”

In addition to earning a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems and a master’s degree in biological sciences from Stanford University, Keesing has a MBA from the University of Maryland, according to his LinkedIn page. 

“Ron Keesing’s appointment as chief AI officer marks a pivotal moment for Leidos,” Leidos CEO Tom Bell said in a statement. “As we navigate a landscape shaped by rapid technological advancements, his leadership will be instrumental in ensuring that AI remains at the forefront of our solutions. At Leidos, we don’t view AI as a replacement for human ingenuity but rather as a trusted partner that enhances our capabilities to deliver unparalleled support for critical customer missions.”

Leidos’ approach to AI, Keesing explained in the news release, is rooted in “anticipating technological trends and leveraging AI’s potential to solve complex challenges across our customers’ missions.”

Also on Tuesday, Leidos announced second quarter results, including revenues of $4.1 billion, up 8% year-over-year.  

On Monday, Leidos reported the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has awarded the company an $823 million task order to provide operations and sustainment for the Department of Defense Network program (DoDNet).

Leidos provides technology, engineering and science services to defense, intelligence, civil and health market customers. It has about 47,000 employees and reported approximately $15.4 billion in 2023 revenue.

Commentary: Va. ecosystem supports growth

It has been almost four years since I began leading economic development and innovation efforts at George Mason University, and what a whirlwind! This is an exciting time to be in Virginia, and getting to do this job every day feels like winning the lottery.

It all started with the Amazon.com HQ2 win in 2018, leading to the buildup of George Mason’s Institute for Digital InnovAtion on our Mason Square campus in Arlington, and the opportunity to leverage the 10 programs George Mason operated to support the entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow.

Focused on continuous improvement and building an ecosystem with more partners, bringing in more resources to Virginia, George Mason now has 24 entrepreneurial support programs — and growing — to match the pace and type of technologies expanding in Virginia.

Here’s what the Virginia ecosystem looks like through the eyes of a not-so-newbie who came here from Michigan:

1. Northern Virginia’s transient culture has made it very welcoming. This creates a nice culture that extends to attracting entrepreneurs from outside Virginia. I’m eternally grateful to all the people in the business and economic development communities who provided introductions and offered to help. When we launched the large-scale annual Accelerate Investor Conference in 2022, it was a marvel to see how the community came together to help pull in, screen and prep tech companies to pitch investors nationwide.

2. Public universities have significant opportunities to leverage assets and collaborate. There is no 800-pound research university gorilla in this state. This means the door is open to mutually beneficial collaboration across institutions. The people involved in moving laboratory technologies to market come from an incredible array of world-class educational, business and government backgrounds. Virginia does a great job of leveraging the government as a customer (the world’s LARGEST customer).

3. The commonwealth has core assets that other states dream of having. Virginia’s economic development talent at the local and state levels is very impressive. The counties play a large role here in developing the regional economy, and I am blown away at their capacity to collaborate. I get really excited when we all discuss the buildup of the knowledge economy here and each “next” exciting program to leverage our assets.

4. We have the same problems but more opportunities than everyone else. I get together a couple of times a year with leaders of tech economies in the nation’s hot spots. Every region in the country will tell you they can’t get enough talent. That’s why I particularly love working for a university where most students are from the region and stay here after they graduate — that’s a real economic growth cycle. George Mason was the first to offer cybersecurity and cloud computing as degrees that were built in partnership with the businesses located here. Also, our faculty and students seem to seamlessly move between joint classes, certifications and entrepreneur programs.

5. We are at the epicenter of the next evolution in tech. Large companies and startups alike are joining in the AI race, and Virginia is singularly at the center of policy, law, defense and digital innovation in a way that other economies wish they could be.

We’re in a global race, and if we want to take a global role, we need to execute strategies that lead the way. Amazon HQ2 is the perfect example of a collaboration between state and regional governments that turned the tide for this economy by leaning heavily into the universities to build out and reach their potential as powerhouses.

Paula Sorrell is associate vice president for innovation and economic development at George Mason University. She directed the University of Michigan’s Economic Growth Institute before joining George Mason in 2020.

From seed to success

On an early morning in summer 2021, a small group of engineers and drone operators gathered at Lake Elsinore in California to see if their machines would fly as designed. With newly incorporated sensor technology, it was the first time the founders of Leesburg-based Flying Ship Co. attempted to fly one of their autonomous vehicles over a lake.

“When we first got it off the ground … that was a nail-biter,’ recalls Flying Ship co-founder and CEO Bill Peterson. Founded in 2020, Flying Ship makes unmanned cargo aircraft.

“We didn’t know if it was going to work. We didn’t know what kind of conditions it would work under, but seeing it work over a body of water was incredible, nerve-wracking and exhilarating all at the same time,” Peterson says. 

For startups and founders, feelings like those can extend to navigating the various funding rounds for securing capital to grow a business and keep it afloat. In pre-seed, seed and early-stage funding rounds, companies take shape, often relying on angel investors, family and friends to cover initial costs. In Series A rounds, growing companies share performance metrics and may rely on funding from one major investor or stock sales. In Series B rounds, proven companies continue to develop their market shares past initial development stages. And in Series C, often already profitable companies look to expand.

When it comes to reporting capital, all startups have to report what they have raised to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and there are specific rules guiding general solicitation and from whom companies can solicit funding. Founders should seek advice from support organizations or lawyers with specific knowledge about raising capital.  

In pre-seed and seed funding rounds, successful funding comes from helping others see your vision, says Scott Janney, co-founder and CEO of Norfolk-based Magazine Jukebox, which provides digital magazines, games and trivia to businesses like doctors’ offices to offer in waiting rooms. Magazine Jukebox had raised $2.7 million in seed funding as of May and plans to raise another $1.6 million, transitioning to Series A in 2025 or 2026. Janney likens navigating the funding stages to traversing mountains and valleys, with the “easy part of fundraising” being the mountain. “When everyone can see what you’re doing, it’s easy,” he says. “The valleys, where you’re making it stretch and working to improve, are what no one sees.” 

Seed rounds are often about the comfort level between investors and entrepreneurs, says Robert Gourdie, founder of Roanoke-based The Tiny Cargo Co. Founded out of lab research at Virginia Tech in 2018, Tiny Cargo extracts exosomes — extracellular biological particles — from cow’s milk for therapeutic and nutraceutical uses on an industrial scale. The company raised $940,000 in a 2023 seed round, and also has secured venture capital backers and grant funding, all of which require different approaches, Gourdie ​​says. 

“When you’re raising capital in a seed round, you meet face-to-face with an investor, and it’s an interesting and important difference [from applying for grants] because you have to look investors in the eye and feel comfortable with the story you’re telling, and they have to feel comfortable with you,” he says.

Flying Ship’s Peterson calls it “betting on jockeys, not horses. … If you have an awesome team in place, boast about the phenomenal people you have,” he says, sharing lessons he learned during the 2022 pre-seed round in which the company raised $500,000.

‘No one perfect formula’

Jen Finn is co-founder and CEO of Richmond-based ​​HIO, which provides an artificial intelligence customer service texting chatbot to property management companies. She has sat on both sides of the table — as an angel investor and as a founder seeking funds, she says. Her advice to founders: Find your niche, show investors the scalability of your product and balance accessibility, all while understanding how much of the company shareholders and investors should have.

HIO raised $95,000 in grants in 2022 from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp.’s Commonwealth Commercialization Fund, $20,000 from Lighthouse Labs and another $450,000 in convertible notes from friends and family. She has not had to give up any equity in her business yet, she says, but that could change in the future because of the convertible notes.

Each funding stage has its own challenges, and there’s no set time for how long a round can last or how many times a company can repeat a stage.

Many companies are receiving less funding than they may have two to four years ago, with companies not progressing through the series or going through multiple seed rounds, says Paul Nolde, managing director of 757 Collab and executive director of 757 Angels powered by VentureSouth.

“Three years ago, we were in a founder-friendly cycle, valuations were high, and terms were founder-favorable, but now it has largely switched to an investor-friendly cycle,” says Nolde. “Capital is a little more constrained, but I believe the best companies will always find capital.” Rising interest rates and pushback against overvalued companies earlier in the 2020s have resulted in large investors and firms keeping their money close. 

In the past, Nolde has counseled fledgling companies to raise only what they need at the time, but with private funding less available, companies should build in a cushion, Nolde says.

Many venture capital groups are pulling back and focusing inwardly on their existing portfolios, leaving companies in early-stage funding rounds for longer periods, says Rich Diemer, managing director of Charlottesville-based CAV Angels, a nonprofit investor network of University of Virginia alumni, faculty, parents, students and friends. There’s no one perfect formula for funding, he says.  

“My advice is to avoid short-term people who are trying to take advantage [of your business],” he says. “That’s the importance of relationships. … Stick with the people who will stick with you.” 

Even for mature companies, successful later series funding rounds are still “a grind,” says Ed Rogers, CEO and co-founder of Charlottesville-based Bonumose, which is commercializing the production of tagatose, a natural sugar with a low-glycemic index. Bonumose completed a Series B funding round in early 2021, raising $34.68 million, according to SEC filings, and is currently in a Series ​​C round.

Rogers encourages entrepreneurs to find investors who have skills and resources that can help their businesses in the long run. 

“Raising money and running a business are not the same,” he says. “If you can find somebody who writes a check but also has connections and expertise, that makes your organization more valuable.” 

McLean AI health care startup raises $111 million

A McLean-based health care tech startup wants to provide more targeted medical treatments for people with cancer, heart disease and other common diseases.

Zephyr AI, founded in 2020, is a precision medicine company on a mission to democratize personalized medicine and is doing it by developing artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that can glean insights from health care data.

“We can’t wait for the next generation of high-fidelity data to deliver on the promise of precision medicine,” says Jeff Sherman. A Zephyr co-founder and chief technology officer, he’s also been the company’s interim CEO since February. “We believe patients need solutions today, so a core tenet of our company has [been] to operate it with a sense of urgency.”

Precision medicine is an approach that uses an individual’s genomic, environmental and lifestyle information to guide decisions related to medical management.

In March, the McLean-based company announced it had raised $111 million in a Series A funding round from about 30 investors, including Revolution Growth, Eli Lilly & Co., Jeff Skoll and Epiq Capital Group.

The company’s co-founders include Grant Verstandig, an entrepreneur who has founded health care and defense companies, and Yisroel Brumer, an entrepreneur who was a past acting director of cost assessment and program evaluation for the Department of Defense.

“We’re bringing in new sources to produce, fine-tune and generate the next version of our algorithms for new, more nuanced precision medicine insights. So that’s on the data and buildout front,” Sherman says.

With 45 employees, Zephyr AI plans to grow its staff significantly over the second half of the year in science and engineering as well as building out a business development and commercial team.

In March 2022, Zephyr AI raised $18.5 million in seed funding, led by Lerner Group Investments and M-Cor Holdings. The company used it to develop core algorithms and put infrastructure in place to host a massive dataset as well as establish its core team.

Discussing his company’s success with investors, Sherman describes how Zephyr AI’s algorithms won them over during a demo.

“We were able to correctly identify how patients who are considered the same clinically actually respond differently to different drugs,” he says. “So, we’re able to demonstrate that in this real-world context, which I think is a pretty high bar for these kinds of companies.”