Once upon a time, the big primes didn’t pay much attention to the lowly startup scene. Now, things have seriously changed, as evidenced by this morning’s announcement from Picogrid. As of today, the integration startup is officially partnering with Northrop Grumman to integrate Picogrid’s Legion software into Northrop’s AiON counter-drone command-and-control (C2) platform.
Friends in high places, indeed.
Picogrid’s pals: We’ve covered Picogrid and its extensive partner ecosystem before. They’ve teamed up with radar startup Echodyne, drone maker Skydio, threat detection company ZeroEyes, French interceptor drone guidance startup Alta Ares, and other startups in the drone and counter-drone detection space.
Northrop is a slightly bigger fish in the Picogrid pond—which could be good news for Picogrid’s other partners, too.
“Once a C2 system like AiON integrates with Legion, it automatically becomes interoperable with the entire Legion ecosystem,” Picogrid’s co-founder Martin Slosarik told Tectonic. “That means every sensor, effector, or autonomy capability already onboarded to Legion can flow into AiON without repeated custom integrations.”
Teaming up: Before we get too into it, here’s what Picogrid’s Legion and Northrop’s AiON platforms can do:
- Legion: Picogrid’s flagship data platform that fuses information fed from different systems to integrate assets, streamline data, and connect to operational tools like the Army’s Android Tactical Awareness Kit (ATAK). It’s kind of a connective tissue between all of the different drones, sensors, robotics platforms, and software in the field that helps them work together.
- AiON: Northrop’s c-UAS C2 platform that operates in the cloud and on edge hardware, allowing operators to command different sites from anywhere. Its open architecture allows for the integration of new effectors, sensors and third-party software—wink wink, nudge nudge to Picogrid’s other partners.
Startup speed: If AiON’s whole open architecture and c-UAS C2 thing sounds a bit like Legion, you’re not wrong. But Slosarik said Northrop’s looking for some startup speed to spice it up.
“AiON’s open design is an excellent foundation,” he said. “Our value proposition comes from the diversity of integrations and our industry-leading pace of delivery. We were able to onramp some partners to Legion in under two hours.”
And it sounds like this partnership won’t be fleeting. “We’re aligning Legion and AiON at the architectural level to ensure long-term compatibility across programs of record,” he said.
Citing Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s promise to “expand the defense industrial base and who we purchase from,” Slosarik added that the government is looking for “exactly this kind of collaboration between startups and traditional primes” and “I believe we are creating a major case study” in the startup-prime dynamic.
It’s always better to do things with friends, especially when they bring in a big chunk of the defense budget. Given the number of major programs Northrop is on, it looks like Picogrid’s trying to partner its way to the top. Not bad for a five-year-old startup.