The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is seeking applications from startups working in the area of GEOINT for its new geospatial accelerator program in St. Louis. The aim is to fund, mentor and accelerate the growth of next-gen GEOINT technologies.
Earlier in November, NGA had announced a first-of-its-kind innovative partnership with Capital Innovators and the Missouri Technology Corporation for launching the accelerator program to drive R&D and commercialization of geospatial technologies and applications. The partnership particularly highlights the significance and contributions that the greater St. Louis-based companies can bring to the geospatial intelligence ecosystem.
The NGA Accelerator will select eight companies to participate in its inaugural 13-week program. The program is set to start from March 22, 2021, and as of now is planned to be in-person in St. Louis. In case of COVID-19 lockdowns or restrictions, it would go virtual.
The program boasts of $100,000 non-dilutive equity grant funding; engagement with NGA Champion Teams; mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs and technical experts; connections to customers and strategic partners; and co-working and first-class office space in St. Louis.
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The startups will have the opportunity to work closely with NGA and receive valuable feedback and resources to pilot opportunities to help businesses accelerate and scale into the future. They will also receive additional help from specific subject matters experts in areas such as technical development, sales, marketing, finance, pricing, operations, or talent development. Intellectual property created by the startups during the program would be retained by them.
The Demo Day is targeted to take place the week of June 21, 2021, when the startups get the opportunity to showcase their business to NGA, the government community, potential investors, customers and others. And although it’s not guaranteed, NGA may select specific companies for additional mentorship and post-program engagement.
Who should apply?
The program is searching for best-in-breed businesses developing novel dual-use technologies (products that have both commercial and military uses), which will grow the number of geospatial solutions available to NGA and its customers.
Startups working in areas like Data Management, Authentication or Data Governance; Data Integrity and Security; Advanced Analytics and Modeling; Predictive Intelligence; Cognitive Computing; Web Services; Blockchain; Cybersecurity; Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning; Computer Vision, Quantum Computing, Natural Language Processing; Internet-of-Things; Hyperautomation; and Big Data, are encouraged to apply.
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The program is open for both hardware and software companies, early-stage or venture-backed enterprise provided their solution has any use that could apply to the GEOINT sector. According to the NGA notification, although it broadly seeks unique geospatial-intelligence technologies, some areas of specific interest include:
- Solutions that can integrate and conflate diverse source data for use across multiple organizations.
- Solutions that can manage and maintain data with common business rules in a product-agnostic manner.
- Solutions that help determine the “fitness of data” from public and commercial sources.
- Solutions that provide a scalable and interoperable way to continuously evaluate data provenance through its lifecycle so that they can make informed decisions about its suitability for use.
- Solutions that provide geospatial web services that feed source data as well as detection and monitoring insights into existing workflows to quickly derive value and meet customer needs.
- Solutions that improve the terrestrial and celestial reference frame, gravity, magnetics, manmade and natural feature extraction and attribution, and bathymetric, topographic, and infrastructure models in order to improve their ability to model the physical Earth.
- Solutions that provide the capability to automatically identify the source, format, and transmission method of data to assess its potential risk.
- Solutions that can protect all data (to include imagery, as with steganography techniques) from unknown or untrusted sources and provide the ability to be checked for hidden and embedded malicious code to protect critical infrastructure.
- Solutions that provide assured Position Navigation and Timing (PNT) innovation and development protected from GPS and GNSS vulnerabilities. Solutions should be cost effective, simple to configure, and rapidly deployable incorporating modern GEOINT software engineering elements, eliminating the need for multiple receivers or antennas in potentially GPS denied areas.
- Solutions that perform accurate automated feature extraction, classification, and characterization from a wide variety of sources including unstructured text.
- Solutions providing automated technologies to categorize detected objects at a broad level of organization or feature and further classify within that category.
- Solutions that automatically characterize the attribution information of extracted foundation geospatial data in order to build upon the knowledge recorded from previous recognition, identification, and classification of objects with the highest level of specificity.
