You can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, but military equipment is (so far) off-limits.
Luckily for all of the shopaholic soldiers out there, the Pentagon’s JIATF-401 counter-drone task force is taking a page out of Amazon’s book and building Prime for the primes (and startups).
Today, they officially unveiled an online marketplace for companies to submit and list the latest and greatest in counter-drone tech and for government customers (both US and allied) to see what’s on offer, evaluate it, and buy it.
- The marketplace was developed by NYC-based software startup Kaizen in “less than nine weeks,” co-founder and CEO Nikhil Reddy told reporters, under a $15M prototype OTA contract awarded by JIATF-401 in May.
- It went live a week and a half ago, and “we’ll continue to bring on more partner nations and a ton more vendors to the system,” he added.
- Kaizen has raised $35M from Accel, NEA, a16z’s American Dynamism practice, and others, including a $25M Series A last October.
Add to cart: As drones and counter-drone systems proliferate, the two-way e-commerce marketplace is meant to provide buyers with an easier way to browse and compare different technologies, filtered by cost, performance, lead times, certification, and specific use cases.
- If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because Ukraine’s been using a similar marketplace—through the country’s Brave1 defense tech cluster—for drone, counter-drone, and other military equipment for the past few years.
- “That’s a pretty accurate description [of what] this technology should be” and “Brave1 does a lot of the same sort of two-way e-commerce marketplace workflows,” Reddy said.
Kaizen’s platform is built around two core tools: Taproot and Blacksmith.
- Taproot is Kaizen’s “global library of compliance-engineered building blocks that we believe can help make any constituent service far better than it currently is—forms, marketplaces, permits, applications, reporting, payments, scheduling, and more,” he said.
- Blacksmith is an “Agentic AI-assisted harness [the infrastructure that wraps around an LLM] that rapidly configures those building blocks to any new mission set” that they work with the government on.
“The marketplace that we developed gives vendors a really structured and delightful way to publish their own products, their technical specifications, repairability information, compliance details, any identifiers about their products, and all the availability that they have,” Reddy said. “JIATF-401 administrators can come in, validate those listings, approve vendors, and make sure that everything posted on the marketplace is at a consistent standard of quality and implementation.”
Cha-ching: On the buyer side—which includes “DoW warfighters, state and local law enforcement, and partner nations,” Reddy said—customers can browse those counter-drone products, plug specific operational environments and requirements into a chatbot, view recommended technologies, and submit a request to buy them, pretty much in one click.
- It’s also built to work with the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Fast Lane initiative. Companies submit their products for inclusion in the initiative, and JIATF-401 and the Pentagon’s export review office evaluate and pre-clear them for foreign sale.
- Publicly announced partner nations onboarded to the platform include Romania, the UK, Australia, Poland, and South Korea.
Early adopters: So far, a handful of drone orders have been placed through the platform, but it’s still “largely in testing with administrators to make sure that the orders are coming through and they’re being adjudicated correctly,” according to Reddy. But even in the early stages, users are fired up about it.
“Anduril, SmartShooter, DroneShield, AeroVironment—all of these vendors that are publishing their products already to the marketplace…have given us extremely strong feedback about how simple it was to get onboarded and go through the vendor onboarding experience,” he said.
“This is one validated marketplace for the global counter-drone ecosystem containing the systems, training, services, and sustainment we rely on. The marketplace is a shared front door to the companies that build these capabilities,” JIATF-401 director Brig. Gen. Matt Ross added in the Pentagon’s hype video. “This gives full access to partners and allies for US-made counter-UAS technology, and then it also allows our partners and allies to sell on the same platform.”
