Obviant Secures $99M DIU Contract for AI-Powered Defense Acquisition Platform

Obviant has secured a $99 million prototype award funded by the Defense Innovation Unit to modernize how the Department of War and other government organizations access and use defense acquisition, contracting and budgeting data.

Under the contract, the technology company will provide DIU’s commercial team with an operating platform to consolidate information spread across disparate requirements, contracting, budgeting, Congressional and program records. The contract also includes options to expand the platform’s use across the armed services and the inter-service Combatant Commands.

How Will the Platform Improve Acquisition Transparency?

The initiative aims to provide leaders across the department and the broader U.S. government with real-time visibility into defense procurement information while helping commercial companies transition and scale more efficiently within the federal ecosystem. Obviant’s artificial intelligence-powered platform ingests data from thousands of sources, including program documentation, defense budget justification books and Congressional reports. By unifying these records, the system provides role-based decision support and maps capability gaps to available solutions while clarifying funding pathways.

“Obviant’s data provides commanders, program managers, analysts and companies a shared, real-time view of mission capability gaps, available solutions, acquisition routes, and funding options,” commented Brendan Karp, the company’s CEO. “Our platform enables faster and better decisions, reduces duplicative efforts, and accelerates delivery of needed capabilities to the front lines.”

Obviant was founded in 2023 by Karp and Dylan Taylor. The startup raised $7.1 million in June during a recent funding round, which was led by Shield Capital. 

“Success in selling to the DoD has been difficult because there is no real-time ‘single source of truth’ about spending on defense mission capabilities or new technologies like resilient communications or unmanned systems,” Michael Brown, former DIU director, a partner at Shield Capital and a Wash100 Award recipient, explained at the time. “Obviant’s solution unlocks better understanding of the spending on these capabilities—at any level of granularity or aggregation—to ensure better decisions.”