The mash-ups continue.
This morning, Second Front Systems (2F) and UK-based Valarian announced a strategic partnership to pair up Second Front’s government-facing commercial tech adoption software with Valarian’s sovereignty-focused data infrastructure to build a “new generation of sovereign-by-design digital solutions with controlled deployment pathways, compartmentalized environments, and audit-first infrastructure.”
For the illiterate among us—basically, the two companies will work together to make sure that stuff deployed through 2F is nice and sovereign, just the way we like it.
“Modern operations demand more than updated software; they demand controlled environments,” Enrique Oti, Chief Strategy Officer at Second Front, said in a statement. “Partnering with Valarian allows us to extend those guarantees into sovereign contexts in the UK, EU, and beyond.”
Toolbox: Second Front sits squarely on the backend, nuts-and-bolts side of things—they make the stuff we don’t think about all that much, but that makes the tech we know and love actually run.
Here’s how their tech works:
- The company—led by CEO Tyler Sweatt—builds and operates a secure DevSecOps and cloud platform called Game Warden that basically makes it a lot easier for commercial software to be developed, certified, deployed, and operated in regulated government networks.
- They cut down the security accreditation process to weeks (or sometimes months) and provide a secure cloud hosting environment where all the commercial software can live and be used by government operators.
- That means that the government can use the tools we all use every day (SaaS FTW) without being exposed to risk. The SaaS companies also don’t have to do all the nasty compliance work from scratch.
Game Warden is hosted on AWS, and the company has said it’s used by companies including Pryzm, DEFCON AI, Cohere, and Jericho Security.
2F has raised a total of $150M from investors, including Salesforce Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, according to Pitchbook data, and boasts a valuation of about $785M. In 2023, the company officially expanded to Europe with the opening of its London office—that’s where this partnership will kick off.
Ring fence: Valarian, for its part, also lives among the nuts-and-bolts of things. The company was founded back in 2019 to build secure data infrastructure and compartmentalized systems for government and defense customers who, put bluntly, don’t want their shit getting out.
The company’s flagship software is called ACRA (Architecture for Compartmentalised, Resilient Applications), which basically:
- Seals data and compute within strict mission-specific compartments
- Logs everything (like, everything), making it audit-ready
- Is deployable in all sorts of environments—on premises, in the cloud, and even in rugged environments (at the edge, baby)
The idea is that a country—say the UK—can trust that when it’s using Valarian, it doesn’t have to wonder whether its data is leaking, even when using things like cloud applications or deploying in low-compute or edgy environments.
The company officially emerged from stealth in May of last year with $20M in funding, and is backed by funds including Scout Ventures and ARTIS Ventures.
Holding hands: You’re probably getting an idea of how the two companies will work together from what they do—2F can deploy stuff for the government, and Valarian can keep it secure and (importantly) sovereign.
“I view Valarian as the sovereign substrate whereby…we can [ensure security and sovereignty] at the digital infrastructure layer, and then work with phenomenal partners like Second Front on the software they’ve already developed to bring those capabilities to the war fighter,” Max Buchan, CEO and founder of Valarian, told Tectonic.
Oti used the example of Project ASGARD—the UK MoD’s effort to speed up battlefield targeting and decision-making through connected digital systems, AI, and secure communications.
“[The MoD] needs to bring in dozens and dozens of commercial or dual-use capabilities into their ecosystem, and the process of actually configuring and hosting and assuring is going to take them a lot of time and a lot of money,” he told Tectonic. “That’s the foundation of Game Warden.”
And, when, say, the British Army is operating way out in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, Valarian’s ring-fencing and data infrastructure will ensure that the stuff being done in those oodles of different software systems stays, well, British.
“What you really need to do [this] right is that substrate, that security…that extended sovereignty that Valarian provides,” Oti added.
The initial partnership is set to last a year, and the two companies declined to share the financials of the agreement.