US Air Force awards Falkonry strategic funding increase

Sunnyvale, CA-based Falkonry, Inc. announced on April 15 it has received a strategic funding increase from the Air Force Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer. These additional funds will help Falkonry expand deployment of its operational AI technology to additional Department of Defense (DoD) customers, including several that have already signed on following the successful completion of early round evaluations.

Falkonry was one of 21 companies who were tentatively selected to receive part of a combined $550 million in Strategic Financing (STRATFI) contracts. Falkonry was selected because of its ability to meet one of the core pillars of the US Air Force strategy, which is rapid, effective decision making. Falkonry’s anomaly detection capability has proven to deliver valuable data insights that help operators quickly observe and react in mission critical situations.

“This award is a significant milestone given only to companies that have proven the value of their technology, and their potential to scale rapidly, as demand from military customers grows,” said Dr. Nikunj Mehta, founder and CEO of Falkonry. “We are currently integrated into the DoD analysis platforms, where we have tripled the number of customers we are now serving, and are ready to help even more military customers in both classified and unclassified environments as their needs for secure operational AI continues to grow.”

Falkonry has already completed Phase I and is currently in Phase II of its AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). During these evaluations, the Falkonry LRS operational AI product was proven to be easily deployable, scalable, highly secure and able to handle massive amounts of data – all of which are key requirements in defense and intelligence applications. By enabling military users to discover, explain and predict critical events from operational data without requiring data scientists, Falkonry LRS provides a new generation of operational AI capabilities to enable mission success and support critical infrastructure.

During Phase I, Falkonry explored critical operational data problems within the Air Force community and was selected by STRATCOM’s Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) to go forward into Phase II. Now in Phase II of this contract, Falkonry’s AI-enabled product is helping JWAC analyze massive amounts of operational data, discover patterns at unprecedented scale and provide real-time inferencing.

“The most complex problems faced in crisis operations and contingency planning involve analysis of large, complex data sets,” said Laura Stuart, R&D project manager, Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), USAF. “Machine-learning approaches, such as those provided by Falkonry, are required to augment humans in mining electronic intelligence (ELINT) data to identify system behavior patterns.”

To provide the highest level of security for government requirements, Falkonry has developed an “Air Gap” version of Falkonry LRS. Air Gap is a network security measure employed on one or more computers to ensure that a secure computer network is physically isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an unsecured local area network.

Source: Falkonry