us-air-force
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Joe Noplis Has Spent a Career Watching the Door
From an Air Force enlistment in 1986 to a federal K-9 career and the daily work of school safety, Noplis has followed one durable idea: people flourish when someone dependable is paying attention.
Robert Slaughter Found the Pentagon's Missing Update Button
An Air Force physicist watched a promising AI project get stranded between a spreadsheet and an aircraft. His answer was Defense Unicorns - an unusually cheerful company built to make military software move at operational speed.
The Austin Drone Company Betting the Air Force Will Ditch the $30,000 Helicopter Hour
Skyways flies cargo drones nobody steers - no joystick, no remote pilot - between air bases and out to oil rigs. Now it wants to turn a hand-built aircraft into a production line.
Sumit Agarwal
Sumit Agarwal is the CEO and co-founder of Ario, a Palo Alto AI assistant that takes aim at the 'invisible labor' of running a household - the school calendars, the returns, the meal planning. Before Ario he co-founded Shape Security, a fraud-prevention company F5 acquired for more than $1 billion. Earlier he was the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, a retired US Air Force major and one of the first officers in network warfare at Cyber Command, and ran mobile operations at Google. Ario raised $16 million in seed funding in June 2024 from Floodgate, Wing Venture Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Moxxie.