Kaizen launches Pentagon counter-drone marketplace, built in nine weeks from blank slate

Speaker 2: Metal song.

Speaker 1: I think we're I think that might be a new bit for us. First, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We've been keeping our next guest too long. We got Nikhil Reddy from Kaizen coming on the show. Let's bring him in. How you doing?

Speaker 2: What's going on?

Speaker 1: What's up, guys? What's up? Legendary outro for John Quinn. Yes. Hopefully, have to hire him but if you do

Speaker 2: Honestly, I was gonna say hopefully you get a chance.

Speaker 1: Yes. The opportunity to work with him.

Speaker 2: Is a no. It's hopefully you don't Yeah. Have him sending you emails ever.

Speaker 1: That's for sure. That's for sure.

Speaker 2: Except maybe a client intake form.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, man. Thank you guys

Speaker 9: so much

Speaker 3: for having me, Jordan. John, big fans.

Speaker 1: Thanks.

Speaker 3: Quick background on me. Started Kaizen in 2022. Before that, was a early engineer at Anderol. Joined from The Bay. Joined Androle right out of school in 2019. Spent two and a half years there as a FDE, so worked on the web interfaces for a lot of the early hardware products that are now flying and doing wonderful things. And before, needed a UI and UX to sort of power some of those assets, and it was amazing opportunity to just go to a bunch of military bases and build really quickly for the warfighter. And then started Kaizen at the end of twenty twenty two, specifically with the the fire to modernize all constituent services. I think that experience showed me how broken and disconnected government application layer systems were. But when you think about it beyond the context of just defense, I know we're here announcing a DOW project, but globally across all governments, all public institutions, I think the worst part of everyone's day is that 08:30AM when you go to the DMV and you have to use the tech stack to renew your driver's license or pay for a permit really quickly or do the basic fundamental task. And if you can make that experience 10 times better, an order of magnitude better, then I think everyone sort of leaves those buildings feeling like their taxpayer dollars are being spent appropriately and that they're being taken care of. And that was the vision, was to go to every single public institution and modernize their application layer that citizens and individuals interact with, I think, more in a volume perspective more than any of their government service and make them 10 x the quality. And that's sort of what we've been up to the last four years selling to city, county, state, and now federal government and announcing a big project with the Department of War.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Congrats.

Speaker 2: Okay. Very cool. Lot lot I wanna understand on on that side of the business. But but, yeah, talk about the the contract Yeah. And and, yeah, parlay this into what you're announcing today.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So we're announcing the launch of the counter drone marketplace that is run by Jaida four zero one, the counter drone task force within the Pentagon. The problem that we're trying to solve is that counter drone assets are being manufactured by American OEMs, many of whom that you've spoken to and have have had on the show. And the threat profile is changing so quickly. The hardware is being manufactured at lights out pace. But then actually think about the process Now that there's an amazing OEM product that needs to be fielded out into a forward deployed region of the world, think about the paperwork, the process, the structure, the 50 different software platforms that someone within the building needs to use to authorize budget for it, get contract vehicles established, then go back and forth with the KO, negotiate that contract, then find the right logistics and management partner to get it on a pallet and get it delivered. You're talking about potentially weeks to months of delay when the warfighter needs that capability and that asset delivered on the pallet tomorrow so they can actually use it in the fight. And that was sort of what for us was the most exciting problem to solve, and four zero one put us on contract in in nine weeks from a blank slate. We designed, developed, and deployed a true two way ecommerce marketplace that looks stunning, rivals whatever you'll see in the private sector where American OEMs can sign on, establish their vendor profiles, upload their products, sell them directly to three different buying groups, department of war capability and offices, people with budget within the department of war that wanna buy now, state local law enforcement, because think about the intra government or intra United States case where you're a state local law enforcement leader and you're protecting MetLife Stadium for FIFA World Cup, you also need to buy counter UAS. So it's a centralized platform for those buyers to log in and purchase those assets. And then partner nations. Allied nations want the best technology. American OEMs make the best technology, and they wanna be buyers on this platform as well. So it's a two way marketplace where buyers can come in, register and validate their profiles. Vendors can do the exact same thing with their products back, and then being able to have the Pentagon have one core centralized source of truth. We've built the entire front end architecture for vendors to post and publish their products, buyers to come in, purchase their transactions, a ton of agentic tooling where even if you're not the expert, you open up our capability planner, you specify in free text that you're protecting a stadium for FIFA World Cup. Here's my threat profile. Here's how much money I'm willing to spend, and immediately suggest a bunch of assets that you can purchase, add it to your cart in one click. And then on the back end, we're working to simplify all the tough, difficult, very frustrating procurement processes to actually get hardware on a pallet sent to the war fighter and to end up and running in nine weeks.

Speaker 2: Uber for drones.

Speaker 1: As as a taxpayer. Sorry. Exactly. Sorry. Had to

Speaker 2: say I had to say that. Every once in a once a year still, I'll see a pitch that's just like we're building Uber for x.

Speaker 1: Wait. Really? You've seen an Uber for x?

Speaker 2: Still see that. Wow. See It's gonna come back. Now and then.

Speaker 1: Dutch East India company for drones. How about that? As a taxpayer, do I want you to win, or do I want a monopoly in software delivery for the government? Because everyone's run the business, and they've had a bunch of different point solutions. And there's a different world here where I'm like, like, this is cool that you're doing this. It's good that I'm happy for you, but also, like, couldn't this just be like one extra module in a Palantir system that's already deployed? Like, why do we need obviously, besides the competitive dynamic, just from a technology perspective, is it okay that we're going have proliferating systems? Is systems integration here not a particular problem? Are you addressing some problem that is too low for other contractors and primes to go after so it would get neglected? And so that's why you're doing this project. Like, help me understand how you fit into the landscape of other prime contractors.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Fantastic question. I mean, like, the answer is actually a little bit of all of the above, actually. Mhmm. From the data layer perspective, our goal is to build application software that is capable of integrating into a seamless, unified, coherent data fabric. I want to write data to a Palantir or a Databricks or an AWS because Got it. Yeah. That fabric is well built Secure. Thoughtfully constructed, secure, compliant. But then you actually look at the market landscape, you're right. Most of the market, I think it's actually dominated by two extremes. When you're thinking about the city, county, state level, largely what we see is super old, janky, private equity owned point solution for blah that hasn't received an update in fifteen years. The engineering team is a bunch of Java developers that found

Speaker 1: Just to steal man, it's some of those businesses are real cash flow machines. Okay. So Yeah. Let's not take They're they're they're businesses. No. No. No. But as a user as a user and not a shareholder, I Yeah. I I I share the frustration with the DMV system every once in a while.

Speaker 3: As a taxpayer, you're you're you're asking yourself, like, what are we doing here? And then on the federal side, most of those platforms are run by a bunch of low margin services companies that are selling hundreds and hundreds of heads and overcharging the government hundreds of millions of dollars, and then we'll spend eighteen, twenty four months trying to build a thing, deploy it as a pilot, largely accomplish nothing. And I think the model that we're trying to apply is, yes, we should own as many application layer solutions as we can. And that's obviously sort of why Kaizen exists. But our goal is to charge based on the outcome and quality. And I would actually argue if we can make those application layer systems in order of magnitude better for the taxpayer from a user friendliness perspective, easier to use, more simple to log in, adjudicate your information, have it approved by an administrator on the back end. And then for the administrators that are spending eight hours a day logging into these platforms trying to triage and do all the paperwork. For them, if you can make their lives in order of magnitude better, I think we're actually solving the real problem. This is why taxpayer money is appropriated to these kinds of services so that we can actually provide a quality of service for our citizens that they deserve. And so for us, the number one goal is make every application layer product across these institutions as good as possible and move away from the point solution for x model and rather go to our customers and say, what is your need? Are you actually trying to make the DMV licensing process better? Or in Jada four zero one's case, they need a Shopify style system for counter drone procurement, and then we should have the technology stack and the set of modules that we can use to rapidly configure against those capabilities and deploy in ninety days or less. And still, I think you can move very quickly and build very quickly as we're seeing in the world today, but also hold a high standard for compliance, security, good guardrails, testing. I think you we live in a world where I think you can have both things, and and I think that's sort of what's been super exciting about our federal progress.