AUSTIN, Texas—In an age where the Pentagon is increasingly likely to tap newer tech companies like Palantir and Anduril to lead a program, older defense companies are looking to pay it forward with promising startups—and learn from them in return.
“We know that if you don’t have that long history as a tech company, supporting the government can be challenging in terms of having the resources available: the infrastructure, the classified facilities, the contract teams,” Kim Lynch, the executive vice president of Oracle’s defense and intelligence business, told Defense One. “And as we’re seeing with the new administration, the barriers to entry are decreasing significantly, but there still is an upfront investment that a lot of companies need to make to be able to successfully do business with the government.”
At its defense tech summit Tuesday, Oracle announced a new defense ecosystem designed to give startups a running start in competing for defense contracts, with access to secure spaces, training and certifications, sales support, and help navigating defense acquisition and cybersecurity standards. They also get access to—but are not obligated to use—Oracle’s cloud and AI services and Palantir’s big data and AI platform.
In return, Oracle gets the chance to “see some of the newer technologies coming out of small companies and deploying them in our cloud,” Lynch said. “We felt that this innovation ecosystem was a great way to be able to combine the power of a large tech company with smaller tech companies to provide solutions to the government.”
The announcement comes as the Defense Department fervently seeks efficiency and rapid tech innovation.
“We’re hearing from the customers—the government customers—that they really want the tech companies to be the primes. Where we might have been integrated by other companies into solutions before, we’re now creating the integration opportunities by bringing companies together underneath our umbrella and going directly to the government with solutions. So, it is a change as we see more pure tech companies becoming primes as well,” Lynch said.
The goal in forging these relationships between the old and new is to produce tech the Pentagon will actually use.
“By partnering with these innovators, we present to the Department of Defense and intelligence community that solution set, rather than a set of products that they then have to integrate. That’s the biggest game for us, is that we get closer to the mission,” said Rand Waldron, who oversees Oracle’s cloud product development. “They are simply at that tip of the spear. That is simply not a place [where] Oracle functions all that often….these innovators bring us connectivity right into that mission, and that’s what we want.”
Shubhi Mishra, founder and CEO of Raft, a defense-focused AI company, told Defense One earlier this year that changing dynamics of the defense industrial base presents an opportunity for startups and non-traditional companies, especially those that are innovative and building things specifically for defense, regardless of size.
“Size doesn’t matter,” Mishra said. “All of these problems are very bespoke problem sets across the different services. And the only way complacency does not set in is if you’re always replacing the existing with the new, and that can only happen when you move fast.”
Solving complex problems like using classified data to improve drones’ targeting as quickly as possible, she said, creates an opportunity to make waves.
“But how do you get these innovative companies that may not be able to compete with the Adurils and Palantirs of the world, but are the ones that are changing the way the fight is won? And how do you keep more and more companies, pulling them through the gate on the other side? Nobody’s talking about that right now. But I think those are the difference makers,” she said. “No matter how cool your tech is, by the time you realize that your tech cannot get you behind those [classified] networks without it being stripped down…you have to build again. And by the time you get there, it’s a new problem set in the software world.”
That’s where prime contractors are stepping in. Earlier this month, John Clark, Lockheed Martin’s head of technology and innovation, announced AI Fight Club, an homage to the late-90s Brad Pitt movie and digital platform where companies can test and vet AI products to see which ones are Pentagon-worthy.
The idea is for companies to “pit their AI up against the government environment with [Lockheed’s] test and evaluation setup to determine how well their systems are performing,” Clark said. “So a lot of these small companies that have great ideas and great AI, but they don’t have the capital to support the full test environment and the full ecosystem that underpins it, they can now connect in and tie into our AI Fight Club environment,” Clark said.
Companies that “compete” in the fight club can take what they learn and improve their tech, then choose whether to share their results with the world. And Lockheed also benefits from those lessons.
“From the internal perspective, we intend to take all the learnings that we have, and apply that into our systems,” Clark said.
In 2024, Lockheed took in $71 billion in sales—60 percent of which goes “into our supply base,” he said. “And so we’re looking for the best of the best to come through our ecosystem, while also vetting the things that are out there. We want the best things in our weapon systems. We want the best things for our warfighter. We want the best things for America. And so we’re going to use AI Fight Club as a mechanism to help vet those technologies and not just have glossy marketing brochures.”
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