In this month’s Founder Spotlight, our partner Parul Singh sits down with James Boyd, CEO of Adyton, a company that offers a mobile operations platform to improve military operations for the Department of Defense.

Here is a slightly edited version of the full conversation.

Q: We’re excited to shine a light on what you’re building. In one sentence, can you describe what you’re building at Adyton?

A: We are building the zero trust mobile operations suite for the Department of Defense and National Security that eliminates friction for the warfighter, elevates team performance, and generates novel data for enterprise decision-making. 

Q: Tell us about your background and what led you to founding Adyton.

A: My career started in technology, and then after college, I enlisted and served in Army Special Forces before returning to technology. I was fundamentally drawn to solving big systemic problems, whether it was in my role in the military or at Palantir, where I built out the intelligence infrastructure for special operations.

At Palantir, I saw persistent problems and challenges that I faced in uniform and throughout my career. There was a huge untapped opportunity with scalability. I learned how to build an enterprise, growing the Special Operations Command business from $2 million a year to $80 million a year. I saw an opportunity to tackle a problem that impacts troops daily and has strategic consequences with unique data assets.

Q: Building in defense tech attracts a very specific profile of person. Can you talk about the impact that you hope to have with Adyton?

A: That’s really a two-part question. Firstly, what do you need to do to go into defense tech, and what’s the impact that you want? I think you have to have a deep love of pain to do things with the Department of Defense, but the reward is having more impact. It’s why people enlist in the first place. They want to be part of something bigger and have a bigger impact. At Adyton, we’re working to create an asymmetric advantage for the US and our NATO allies by enabling higher operating velocity for our troops and improving the quality of decision data for leaders. This allows us to observe, orient, decide, and act faster than our adversaries.

In concrete terms, this means having a more accurate understanding of our people and equipment. We’re bringing the velocity seen in the consumer and B2B space into the Department of Defense, generating data assets that enable modern decisions about resourcing our people and equipment more efficiently.

Q: You said that to build in defense tech, you have to love pain. Can you tell us about some of the challenges you faced in starting Adyton?

A: We started building the enterprise blocks before defense tech was cool, establishing contract vehicles, cyber compliance, and procurement capital listings before people were really doing defense. Garry and Initialized’s foresight to invest in this was crucial. Educating investors about why this was an interesting sector was challenging. Recruiting was also a key part, as defense had not fully established itself in the startup and venture space. Finding people who wanted to be part of defense tech before it had widespread publicity was challenging.

Q: How difficult was it to break into an industry that is very regimented and follows procedures and playbooks that are decades-old?

A: There are two parts to that, grounded in empathy and understanding of reality. Ray Dalio talks about operating in reality, which the tech ecosystem does really well. From the empathy perspective, my cofounder, JJ, and I have over 20 years of defense experience each, seeing from the ground up to the enterprise level where the challenges and pain points are for different stakeholders. Veterans have an advantage in working with the Department of Defense because of the trust built through shared experiences in uniform, enabling different conversations to take place.

Q: Can you share any “war stories” from navigating the procurement process and how that has evolved over time?

A: A no-BS war story: It was a Sunday evening at 7:00 PM. I had spent the last three days with my co-founder in Angleton, Texas, capturing training data at a medical training facility. Covered in fake blood and grime, I checked my email and received a message from the Air Force saying, “Congratulations, you are on short final for an award.” I’ve done a lot of contracts in my time, working with Special Operations Command and Marine Special Operations, Navy Special Operations, Army Special Operations. But there was this term used in the email that I didn’t actually understand. We had to google it and found out it was lingo from the aviation community that means you’re about to land and things are on track. That turned out to be our first contract in 2019. Navigating the Department of Defense and its sub-tribes requires cross-cultural knowledge and communication to understand everything taking place. 

Q: What advice would you give to other founders building in defense tech?

A: The defense ecosystem is large, with resource sponsors at the Pentagon, program managers in the procurement bureaucracy, leaders at major headquarters, unit leadership, and warfighters. It pays to think about the signal you receive from your customers and the people providing feedback. Understand who is providing the feedback, their role, their organization’s function, and their authorities. The Department of Defense has done much to accelerate technology adoption with different innovation ecosystems, but critical thinking is needed to identify who has what authorities.

Q: Is there anything you’ve learned along the way that helped you figure out when you’re on the road to nowhere versus when you’re on the right track?

A: At Palantir, I saw the entire spectrum of enterprise sales and interacted with all different stakeholders in the ecosystem, from the unit level through the program office and procurement bureaucracy to the CDM leaders and the legislative branch. Understanding the full spectrum and where the authorities and responsibilities lie with each participant is crucial.

Q: I imagine the challenge of onboarding your customers, building what you’re building, must be so different from just a pure B2B SaaS enterprise company. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

A: Accessing your users can be a real challenge. Traditionally, you need to get permission to get onto a base, find a building not listed on a map for security reasons, figure out how to get a badge, and find the right person to engage with. In my past experience at Palantir, this involved flying around the world to places like Baghdad or Kabul, getting permission to get on base, finding a forklift to pick up equipment, and physically racking the servers. At Adyton, we set up the bureaucratic infrastructure to enable us to do things differently. We launched a product with a single Army Special Forces soldier, and it spread to other units and soldiers. We launched this as a module inside of our suite, so it’s inheriting all of the same cyber compliance and procurement authorities that we’d already established. We now have users across all the Army Special Forces groups, and since we launched Facebook advertisements three weeks ago, we’ve had over 600 soldiers fill out a sign up form to get onto the waiting list. So far,we’ve onboarded soldiers from 23 different brigades, and all it takes is a 30-minute call and a single text message. It’s a very different onboarding experience because we made the investment in establishing those bureaucratic infrastructures beforehand. So, thankfully, no camel spiders, no forklifts, no Baghdad. Just a Zoom call.

Q: Can you share something you’re excited about that’s coming up this year?  

A: I’m excited about the equipment and logistics tracking feature we just launched, called Log-E. In three weeks, we reached 23 brigades, generating a very rich data asset for them. This feature is a huge priority for the Chief of Staff of the Army, reducing the amount of unnecessary equipment on property books and maintenance timelines. The growth is unreal, with soldiers spreading it within and between units. This opens up other modules to be used, tracking equipment, people, issuing instructions, and coordinating activities. This kind of adoption in the Department of Defense is something I’ve never seen before and is very exciting.