The Pentagon’s counterdrone task force awarded Kaizen Laboratories $15 million to build a “two-way” marketplace designed, in part, to make selling tech to foreign militaries easier.
The site was built from a “blank slate” and developed to facilitate the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sale Fast Lane Initiative, Nikhil Reddy, Kaizen’s co-founder and CEO, told reporters ahead of the announcement.
“We just launched it, and we’ll continue to bring on more partner nations, a ton more vendors to the system,” Reddy said.
The AI-backed marketplace has been online for about two weeks, but details of the contract weren’t publicly released until late Monday. The Pentagon awarded Kaizen the contract on May 8 through a rapid acquisition tool called an other transaction agreement.
The new marketplace aims to provide a single point of purchase for the U.S. military and allies and partners, while helping them find the right technology that’s also interoperable. State and local agencies are also being onboarded, Mike Obadal, the Army undersecretary, said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Thursday.
“Networked air defense, whether it’s counter-UAS or ballistic missile, is critical because everyone has to be able to see the same picture,” which can mean sharing or having “commonality” in information and equipment where possible, Obadal said.
The Defense Department, other federal agencies, and certain “foreign governments are able to go on the counter-UAS marketplace, where we have a number of different industrial options. We’ve got all kinds of AI workflows in there. You can say: ‘Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve, and it’ll set up a package for you.’”
The platform is particularly helpful with foreign military sales, for which the portal and its Amazon Web Services backbone allows the Pentagon to “start the paperwork for a foreign military partner that immediately becomes a letter of intent or a letter of request,” Obadal said. “The initial ask from a foreign government is, ‘we would like to investigate these capabilities.’ Traditionally, that goes into our FMS, our foreign military sales process, which takes months at best to get to the other end.”
Australia, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, and the United Kingdom are currently approved to use the marketplace, which could help the U.S. align its counterdrone tech with their militaries.
“Allowing them access to the pricing, the availability, the capabilities, all on a digital database … And then the backside of that, generating the FMS process and starting that FMS process is incredibly powerful,” Obadal said. “And so now we can come together with an informed discussion on how do we network counter-UAS between our countries, our deployed forces, our partners…That’s what we’re trying to promote with the use of modern tools like the marketplace.”
Reddy said he wants to make the marketplace the best “on the internet,” with lots of features, such as integrating test data, that he hopes to add in a matter of weeks.
“There’s a ton of agentic tooling that we want to build into the platform, discovery, comparison of products…Testing integration so that you purchase an asset and you can immediately see testing and integration data to ensure that compliance is there,” Reddy said. “We’ve met with logistics leaders across the military that want repairability information and right-to-repair catalogs built into the marketplace. So all of that is coming.”
