DIB Innovators

Sasha Seymore, Co-founder & President at Ethos, walked onto the UNC basketball team as a senior, struggled with outdated playbook training, and turned that frustration into a company that cuts military schoolhouse failure rates by two-thirds while saving millions per location. His co-founder Andrew was student body president studying active learning pedagogy, and together they built a platform that measures knowledge gaps impacting performance rather than just tracking completion. 

The dual-use approach serves defense, life sciences, manufacturing, and retail customers with one unifying principle: accelerating time to competency on critical knowledge that directly affects performance outcomes. Sasha's experience as a Navy reservist with the Defense Innovation Unit gives him essential customer empathy and insight into institutional problems that outsiders miss. The five-year vision centers on becoming the comprehensive training and readiness platform as new weapon systems roll out faster than traditional training can accommodate.

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Zone 5 Technologies cut cruise missile costs from $1.5 million to $200,000 by rethinking not just the engineering, but how you build the supply chain and factory floor around cost targets from day one. Thomas Akers, CEO, shares how his team goes from contract award to weapon flight in 4 months by keeping engineers right next to the production line, writing all their own software, and doing machining in-house. When a problem hits the shop floor, an engineer can be there in a minute.

The real insight is what he calls their "production-focused requirement set." Instead of designing for maximum performance and then figuring out how to build it, they start with manufacturing rate targets and work backward. Every design decision serves the question: how fast can we make this weapon at scale?

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What happens when China sanctions your drone company? For Skydio, it became the catalyst for complete supply chain independence and battle-tested technology that now guides Ukrainian artillery strikes. Mark Valentine, Global Head of National Security Strategy, breaks down the story for Dave: when their drones in Ukraine failed due to single-band radios and GPS dependence, his team made 36 field visits over two years, embedded Ukrainian engineers, and developed Asimov software enabling complete GPS-jammed operation with frequency-hopping radios. 

But the real revelation isn't military, it's civilian. While the DoD debates drone strategy, law enforcement has already cracked the code. New York City operates 600 dock-based drones integrated with ShotSpotter and domain awareness systems. Single operators supervise unlimited robots through connected systems and dock-based persistence — capabilities the military avoids due to connectivity phobia.

Mark also offers his leadership framework, distilled from Microsoft's Satya Nadella, centers on distinguishing "two-way door" decisions (reversible, move fast) from "one-way door" decisions (irreversible, deliberate carefully). This becomes critical in startups where you're making calls alone without institutional backup: speed depends entirely on recognizing which type of decision you're facing.

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Defense contractors assume they understand CMMC assessments, but Matt Bruggeman, Director of GTM Federal at A-LIGN, has a harsh reality check for them: organizations consistently arrive for certification without basic documentation like authorization boundaries or data flow diagrams. The gap between CMMC perception and assessment reality is creating a compliance crisis, he tells Dave.

A-LIGN operates as a top-3 FedRAMP assessor and C3PAO, giving Matt unique visibility into federal compliance across multiple frameworks. His unconventional background combining electrical engineering from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base with professional improv comedy shaped his approach to explaining complex technical requirements through clear communication.

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Venus Aerospace achieved the first flight of a high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine, proving that decades of theoretical research can translate into breakthrough propulsion technology. Sassie Duggleby, CEO & Co-founder,  tells Dave about conducting eight engine tests per day while maintaining manufacturing, mission control, and testing in the same facility compressed development timelines from decades into four years.

The breakthrough enables rockets to operate with 67% propellant instead of the industry standard 90%, creating massive payload advantages for defense applications. Sassie shares their strategic pivot from commercial hypersonic travel to defense applications as geopolitical realities shifted, and how combining detonation technology with ramjet systems creates single engines capable of accelerating from takeoff to Mach 5 with no moving parts. She also addresses advanced fundraising strategies for deep tech companies and regulatory challenges including FAA limitations that forced them to throttle capable systems during testing.

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America's defense innovation pipeline has a massive bottleneck that most people don't even realize exists: the infrastructure access problem that prevents our best technology companies and cleared talent from working on classified programs. Sean Blackman, Co-founder & CEO at Nooks, experienced this firsthand as a Navy F-18 pilot trying to get non-traditional companies onto classified contracts, only to discover the catch-22 that has plagued defense innovation for decades. His solution is treating classified infrastructure like cloud computing rather than requiring bespoke facilities

Sean's journey from the cockpit to Meta's anti-misinformation team to highlights why traditional approaches to classified work infrastructure are failing at scale. With 5 million Americans now holding security clearances compared to hundreds of thousands decades ago, the old model of one company, one contract, one SCIF simply doesn't work anymore. The conversation with Dave explores how Nooks is building a network of shared classified facilities that companies can access for $500 per user per month — less than the cost of flying across the country to use traditional SCIFs. 

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The underwater domain has become central to great power competition, yet existing autonomous underwater vehicles cost $500,000+ and require teams of specialists to operate single units. Nelson Mills, CEO & Founder of Vatn Systems, and his team have flipped this equation, building vehicles that travel 30+ knots underwater while enabling one operator to deploy hundreds of units with minimal training. 

Nelson's experience as an investor proved invaluable not just for fundraising connections, but for understanding what investors seek in defense companies and how to structure deals effectively. His focus on user experience draws from consumer technology principles, recognizing that ease of use and intuitive operation create force multiplication effects that traditional defense contractors often overlook. 

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The defense industrial base faces a manufacturing crisis that goes far deeper than workforce shortages, and John Albers, President/CEO of Albers Aerospace has positioned his company at the center of solving it. He grew Albers Aerospace from solo systems engineering to a $10 million vertically integrated manufacturer through 12 strategic acquisitions, all funded internally without outside investment until late 2024. His approach reveals how speed, strategic diversification, and long-term thinking can build resilient defense manufacturing capabilities even as traditional approaches struggle with slow cycles and demographic challenges.

John tells Dave that he attributes his business philosophy to reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letters repeatedly after his first business venture failed. Rather than taking distributions, he focused on building company value through acquisitions that provided both capability and customer diversification. The strategy proved prescient as his company evolved from services into weapons manufacturing, now producing components for F-35, F-16, and multiple missile programs while maintaining aircraft integration capabilities through recent acquisitions.

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The Ukrainian conflict revealed a stark reality that should light a fire under American defense planners: modern warfare consumes weapons at rates that would exhaust our entire arsenal in months, not years. In his conversation with Dave on the latest DIB Innovators, Kunal Mehra, President of Scientific Systems, brings a unique perspective to solving this crisis, shaped by his family's experience fleeing partition-era India and his father's determination to strengthen democratic nations through advanced technology.

Kunal argues that our addiction to "exquisite systems" has created a fundamental mismatch between 20th century military thinking and 21st century threats. The solution requires abandoning the hardware-defined military model in favor of software-defined capabilities that can rapidly turn commercial platforms into effective weapon systems. Scientific Systems' CMA platform demonstrates this approach across three layers: individual platform navigation without GPS, collaborative swarm coordination, and cross-domain orchestration. This architecture has proven adaptable from sea floor to space, enabling autonomous kill chain closure from detection to engagement.

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When America's adversaries can outbuild us in ships, what's our strategic advantage? Paul Lwin, CEO & Co-founder of HAVOCai, shares how his company is revolutionizing maritime operations by creating affordable autonomous vessels that can operate in swarms. As a Myanmar refugee who first saw American uniforms during his evacuation at age 10, Paul brings a unique perspective to defense innovation, combining his military experience with Silicon Valley approaches to solving national security challenges.

On this episode of DIB Innovators, Paul tells Dave about how, in just 17 months, HAVOCai has delivered 31 autonomous vessels to the Department of Defense, generated $3 million in revenue without government R&D funding, and demonstrated capabilities that outpace competitors who've been in the space for over a decade. Their conversation highlights how defense startups are creating asymmetric advantages for America by leveraging commercial manufacturing capacity, off-the-shelf components, and sophisticated software to transform maritime operations in the Pacific.

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