STARKVILLE — Starkville-based software company Camgian Corporation announced Tuesday that it was awarded a $55 million contract to develop advanced kill chain automation technologies for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense systems.
Founder and CEO Gary Butler said it is the largest contract the company has landed since it was started in 2006.
“This is a big deal for us,” Butler told The Dispatch Thursday. “This is a very important problem that we want to solve as a company. We feel like being able to deliver this type of capability … could have a tremendous impact on national security, so it’s a huge motivation for us as a team and a company to go solve this problem.”
Camgian builds software systems that use artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms to drive faster, higher quality decisions. The primary focus, Butler said, are systems that can break down a certain decision workflow into individual tasks. Algorithms are then applied to the tasks to speed up the decision making process.
“So if you think about a company or an organization, there’s a lot of manual decisions that are going on today in industry, and ultimately what we do is build these software applications to speed those up, improve their quality and reduce the overall labor required to execute those decisions,” he said.
Camgian will do the same work for the Army, but with a focus on improving kill chain automation. The kill chain is the process of observing, understanding, deciding and acting in a battlefield environment, Butler said.
“Given the enormous volume of data that’s generated on today’s battlefield from cameras, video systems, radars and other sensors, manually executing kill chains — meaning ingesting all the information, trying to understand it … trying to act on it — is very time consuming,” he said.
With the speed of today’s warfare, there’s little time to spend making that decision. On top of that, Butler said, it cognitively overwhelms soldiers to make solid decisions quickly. So Camgian’s goal is to speed up that process.
The company has a product called Reactor that uses AI machine learning algorithms to automate decision workflows, which helps warfighters close kill chains faster, Butler said.
“Software systems use these algorithms to ingest very large volumes of data, process that data in a way that humans understand it more effectively,” he said. “And then they can act on that data in much smaller timescales, but also with much less labor.”
That technology will be leveraged under the contract for air missile defense to quickly assess large scale aerial threats. When there are several different aerial threats on a battlefield, determining the right target can be a critical problem, Butler said.
“So what we’re doing is assisting our air defenders to deliver the right weapons to the right targets at the right time,” he said. “What we’re allowing our warfighters to do is target and engage and defeat threats more at machine speed as opposed to these long lead times of human speed.”
Butler said the contract is a strong boost to Camgian’s growth. He anticipates growing by 40% by the end of this year, which means the company will be continuing to hire employees.
“In our company, most of our employees are technical,” he said. “It really falls in four buckets: AI engineers, software engineers, data scientists and data engineers. And so we’re aggressively continuing to expand the number of employees we have in that area.”
Jeff Freeman, vice president for government business development, said the contract also opens opportunities for the company to grow within the aerial defense market.
“This was the largest competitive contract awarded to the company to date, providing a significant strategic growth opportunity in the Aviation and Missile Defense Market,” Freeman said in a press release. “The multi-year period of performance provides the company with the flexibility to support various requirements and end users.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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