Jen Judson
Source LinkThe U.S. Army is rolling out a new initiative, dubbed Fuze, that leaders say will overhaul how the service invests in technology by borrowing from Silicon Valley’s venture capital playbook.
The service is betting that venture-style risk-taking can shave years off procurement timelines and will determine whether Silicon Valley speed can mesh with Pentagon scale.
“With Fuze, the Army is telling innovators that we’re open for business. Fuze will help us to not only invest but scale promising capabilities — bridging the valley of death,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a statement to Defense News.
Unlike traditional procurement that starts with an Army-defined problem followed by appointing a company to solve the problem, Fuze flips the approach. The new process allows the service to find technology to bring in “that helps us think about what our problems are differently,” Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, told Defense News in a recent interview.
Venture capitalists make 100 investments and only end up with a few with outsized returns. The Army is accepting that same risk to capture bigger payoffs.
“We’re really taking the approach where we’re going to deliberately make a large number of investments in emerging tech companies,” Matt Willis, the Army’s Fuze program director, said in the interview. “Some tech might not reach the maturity that we want, [but] there’s going to be some companies that are going to have an outsized, revolutionary impact on our soldiers.”
The program aligns four existing fundings streams: XTech prize competitions, small-business funding, tech maturation and manufacturing technology — worth about $750 million in fiscal 2025.
The Army plans to initiate the program by running an XTech Disrupt live pitch competition, in partnership with Y Combinator — a technology startup accelerator and VC firm — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference next month in Washington.
The service is betting that venture-style risk-taking can shave years off procurement timelines and will determine whether Silicon Valley speed can mesh with Pentagon scale.
“With Fuze, the Army is telling innovators that we’re open for business. Fuze will help us to not only invest but scale promising capabilities — bridging the valley of death,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a statement to Defense News.
Unlike traditional procurement that starts with an Army-defined problem followed by appointing a company to solve the problem, Fuze flips the approach. The new process allows the service to find technology to bring in “that helps us think about what our problems are differently,” Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, told Defense News in a recent interview.
Venture capitalists make 100 investments and only end up with a few with outsized returns. The Army is accepting that same risk to capture bigger payoffs.
“We’re really taking the approach where we’re going to deliberately make a large number of investments in emerging tech companies,” Matt Willis, the Army’s Fuze program director, said in the interview. “Some tech might not reach the maturity that we want, [but] there’s going to be some companies that are going to have an outsized, revolutionary impact on our soldiers.”
The program aligns four existing fundings streams: XTech prize competitions, small-business funding, tech maturation and manufacturing technology — worth about $750 million in fiscal 2025.
The Army plans to initiate the program by running an XTech Disrupt live pitch competition, in partnership with Y Combinator — a technology startup accelerator and VC firm — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference next month in Washington.
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