Natural language processing startup Danti won a potential $75,000 award to identify capabilities that transform the way the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and its partners search and discover geospatial content.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and geospatial technology startup Danti won the geoSpatial Environment for Access, Retrieval & Content Hosting (gSEARCH) Challenge for its solution to deliver increased decision superiority to warfighters by utilizing vast amounts of imagery and geospatial data at a scale and scope ahead of any adversary.

Access to geospatial data held within both government and commercial repositories continues to be a significant inhibitor to maximizing the utility of commercial capabilities for unclassified and classified use cases, such as developing cutting-edge dual-use technologies.

Over the last month, companies in the gSEARCH Challenge pitched novel solutions to reduce the time-consuming and expensive data integration process for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to search and discover multi-formatted geospatial content within government-managed and commercial data repositories.

Danti’s cutting-edge technology received the top prize for its ability to enable non-expert users with no geospatial background to quickly prioritize, analyze, and organize information into action.

“Today, the warfighters still have a lot of dependencies on the deep geospatial analysis institutions, and they have been seeking the ability to reduce that need to shorten the decision and planning cycle. If a capability like this does not continue, then the warfighter will continue to be at risk of long decision cycles… and as such the risk that our adversaries will be able to make quicker, more informed decisions giving them a strategic and tactical advantage,” explained Danti CEO Jesse Kallman.

Through conversations with DoD organizations, geospatial data users, and the intelligence community, Danti received insights into DoD requirements and unmet needs of warfighters to solve as it works with NGA to further develop its winning solution.

“From a business perspective, discussing the requirements with various government users and seeing how widespread this issue is across the DoD and IC had a huge impact on product validation. As we discussed further on applications, ideas around how this could be used to inform autonomous systems, and how this could possibly impact our warfighters closer to the edge in a matured state was highly impactful,” added Kallman.

Through follow-on opportunities, Danti plans to continue to help NGA and its partners access important data and use the data to ensure our nation’s decision superiority.

About National Security Innovation Network

NSIN is a government program office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OSD(R&E)) that collaborates with major universities and the venture community to develop solutions that drive national security innovation. We operate two portfolios of programs and services: Talent and Venture. Together, these portfolios form a pipeline of activities and solutions that accelerate the pace of defense innovation.