DIB Innovators

RADICL
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Technology
  • Updated Biweekly

The DIB Innovators podcast celebrates the brilliant minds behind innovation within the Defense Industrial Base. In each episode, host and co-founder of RADICL, David Graff will speak with DIB leaders who are driving technological advancements, championing our nation’s security, and shaping the future of defense technology. Brought to you by RADICL — Cybersecurity-as-a-Service purpose-built for small and mid-sized businesses in the Defense Industrial Base. Starting your CMMC journey? RADICL guides and accelerates your compliance—while reducing ransomware and other cyber risks—with a transparent, turn-key solution. www.radicl.com/cmmc_solved

  1. EP 107 — Hidden Level's Antoinett Dufort On The Scaling Problem Most DIB Companies Ignore

    4d ago

    EP 107 — Hidden Level's Antoinett Dufort On The Scaling Problem Most DIB Companies Ignore

    The defense industrial base has no shortage of innovation. It has a scaling problem. At Hidden Level , the team went from building prototype passive RF sensors to producing operational systems at scale. The operational playbook behind that leap started when Antoinett Dufort joined as employee number 20. Now VP of Operations, Antoinett shares how she built manufacturing, supply chain, and quality systems with future scale in mind from day one, and the decisions that positioned Hidden Level to meet surging demand without scrambling to catch up. Topics discussed: Why the DIB has a scaling problem, not an innovation problem Building manufacturing processes with future scale designed in from day one Investing in supply chain relationships and inventory ahead of confirmed demand Using "what would have to be true" as a planning framework for production scale Applying healthcare's patient-centered mindset to defense manufacturing quality Workforce development through university and community college partnerships The make vs. buy decision for sensor assembly and calibration Navigating demand uncertainty when forecasts are replaced by insights Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    40 min
  2. EP 106 — Space Copy's Madison Feehan On Building Infrastructure With Local Materials In Earth's And Space's Most Extreme Environments

    6d ago

    EP 106 — Space Copy's Madison Feehan On Building Infrastructure With Local Materials In Earth's And Space's Most Extreme Environments

    Space Copy builds ruggedized 3D printers that take in raw local materials, soil, sand, scrap metal, ceramics, even simulated moon dust, and print infrastructure on-site in the most extreme environments on Earth and in space. With 300 pre-orders, a NASA contract, and a planned lunar deployment by 2031, they are eliminating the need for external supply chains entirely. Madison Feehan, Founder and CEO of Space Copy, tells Dave how she went from a part-time role at NASA at 16 to founding a company whose printers can operate from the Arctic Circle to the lunar surface. Their second-gen technology is being built this summer, with a live demo at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center planned for the end of this year and mass deployment targeted for 2027 and 2028. Topics discussed: Building 3D printers hardened for any material class, polymers, ceramics, metals, and regolith Pre-selling 300 units before mass production begins Printing infrastructure from interlocking bricks to precision tools with no supply chain Navigating the material science challenge of multi-material 3D printing in one mechanism Planning a 2031 lunar surface deployment through a NASA Space Act Agreement Arctic analog astronaut testing combined with humanitarian infrastructure building Raising a $5 million seed round after years of grants and contracts Turning space debris into feedstock for 3D printing antennas Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    17 min
  3. EP 105 — Delta.g's Tony Lowe on Taking Quantum Gravity Sensing From Lab to Field

    Jun 25

    EP 105 — Delta.g's Tony Lowe on Taking Quantum Gravity Sensing From Lab to Field

    Delta.g built a quantum gravity gradiometer that detects underground voids, tunnels, and buried targets in 200 milliseconds per reading, a capability conventional gravity sensors cannot match. Legacy tools are so sensitive to environmental noise that they require extended settling time to separate signal from background, and even then the gravitational reading can be indistinguishable from interference. Delta.g's solution is gradiometry: two stacked identical quantum gravimeters, both built on rubidium atoms cooled to as cold as space, registering the same environmental noise simultaneously.  Bring the readings together, cancel the shared noise, and what remains is the gravity signal. CEO Tony Lowe explains why the same sensor that maps what's underground can navigate without GPS, and walks through the operational architecture behind commercializing a 10-year, £20 million University of Birmingham research program: how to move from a three-person academic founding team to a 15-person cross-functional company, and how the "Mechanical Turk" deployment model lets an early-stage deep tech company put real data in front of paying customers before full automation is ready.  Topics discussed: How quantum gravity gradiometry cancels environmental noise to detect underground voids and tunnels in real time Why conventional gravity sensors fail in operational environments and how Delta.g's dual-sensor design eliminates the signal-to-noise  The dual-use case for quantum sensing: underground void detection for defense and civil engineering plus GPS-independent navigation for subsurface platforms How Delta.g structured a £4.6 million (~$6.5M) seed round with UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund participation while still at TRL 6 The "Mechanical Turk" deployment model for early-stage deep tech: manually operating the system on customer sites to prove value before building full operational scale Why technology is not the product, and how Delta.g's first key hire is bridging the gap from prototype to deployable system Building sovereign and secure supply chains at fewer than 10 employees using an Arena PLM system   Scaling team and process discipline in deep tech startups: when to hire versus when to fix the process How to use the "I intend to" leadership model to push decisions to the right level Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    50 min
  4. EP 104 — Impac Systems Engineering's Justin Smart On Cutting The Weight From An Aerospace Part Without Losing Structural Performance

    Jun 23

    EP 104 — Impac Systems Engineering's Justin Smart On Cutting The Weight From An Aerospace Part Without Losing Structural Performance

    Justin Smart has spent 30 years in additive manufacturing. Now at Impac Systems Engineering, he helps manufacturers adopt 3D printing for production-scale applications, including a continuous carbon fiber process that reduces an aerospace component's weight by 78% while matching the original's load capacity and vibration modulus. Justin tells Dave how photopolymers went from sun-sensitive prototypes to engineering-grade plastics in five years, how metal printing costs dropped to a fifth of what they were, and what it actually takes to scale additive beyond prototyping. Topics discussed: Photopolymers going from sun-sensitive to engineering grade Metal printing entry costs dropping fivefold in five years Continuous carbon fiber forced through 3D printed parts A weldment replacement at 78% less weight for space Printing almost 13,000 small gears in one 12-hour build Shipping containers converted into deployable drone factories Workforce pipeline changes as 3D printing enters universities  Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    21 min
  5. EP 103 — OpenC3's Greg Bonn On How A 20-Year-Old Defense Prime Spin-Out Turned Profitable In Year One

    Jun 18

    EP 103 — OpenC3's Greg Bonn On How A 20-Year-Old Defense Prime Spin-Out Turned Profitable In Year One

    How does a 20-year-old product spun out of a defense prime become a profitable, bootstrapped business in year one, all while staying fully open source? At OpenC3, it starts with refusing to charge for the core product and selling everything customers actually need to run it at enterprise scale. Greg Bonn, COO of OpenC3, tells Dave how the company's COSMOS platform went from automating benchtop spacecraft test equipment in 2006 to running mission operations for satellite fleets today. After 17 years at a major aerospace prime and a stint inside AWS, Greg joined a three-person team with a mature product, profitable economics, and zero outside capital. Greg also breaks down why their two biggest competitors remain internally developed tools and their own open source version, and why VC money is finally flowing into space command and control for the first time in 20 years. Topics discussed: Bootstrapping a 20-year-old product into year-one profitability Monetizing open source through COSMOS Enterprise features and services The hardware integration and test problem COSMOS was built to solve Why internal tools and their own open source product are the two biggest competitors AWS's radical ownership culture applied to a small defense software company The Pets vs. Cattle shift coming to proliferated satellite constellations Shipping an MCP server instead of bundling an LLM for regulated customers Launching the COSMOS App Store to stop duplicative integration work The 12-PDF RFP problem and how primes can make solicitations easier Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    40 min
  6. EP 102 — Vendra's Shan Mohta On Going From 200 Investor Rejections To Parts Orbiting Earth

    Jun 16

    EP 102 — Vendra's Shan Mohta On Going From 200 Investor Rejections To Parts Orbiting Earth

    At Vendra, three operations engineers manage over 250 U.S. suppliers. A top competitor worth $5 billion needs one ops engineer for every two to three suppliers. The difference is a software layer that reads CAD files, matches parts to qualified shops, and orchestrates the full supply chain from quote to delivered hardware. Shan Mohta, Co-Founder and CEO of Vendra (YC S24), designed hardware at Microsoft, Apple, and Skydio before building the platform. Vendra now ships flight hardware for aerospace and defense customers, with parts in orbit and on upcoming launch vehicles. Topics discussed: Why custom part sourcing is still a manual process Building a data layer on top of U.S. machine shops Automating shipping, procurement, and CAD analysis with AI agents Scaling from prototype orders to 500-part monthly runs Qualifying suppliers through on-site facility walks Maintaining ITAR compliance as an early-stage startup Lessons from seven or eight pivots inside Y Combinator Turning a former employer into your first customer Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Web

    30 min
  7. EP 101 — Purple Rhombus's Mike Benitez On Building 100,000 Group 2 Drones A Year Using Factories That Already Exist

    Jun 11

    EP 101 — Purple Rhombus's Mike Benitez On Building 100,000 Group 2 Drones A Year Using Factories That Already Exist

    Mike Benitez, CEO of Purple Rhombus, has built the Grackle™, an attritable Group 2 UAS, on a production model he claims can deliver 100,000 units a year using factories that already exist. Mike walks Dave through why most UAS companies can build prototypes fast but cannot scale, and how Purple Rhombus splits the airframe "truck" from a separate "missionization" layer for one-way attack, ISR, or aerial target. He also lays out the supply chain math nobody talks about. A single supplier of servos (the small motors that steer the drone) at 8,000 a month caps you at 2,000 aircraft, so Purple Rhombus is building a five-vendor backup ecosystem. The thesis is simple. Real production capacity deters conflict. Topics discussed: Why Group 2 and Group 3 drones are the real gap in the US arsenal The 30 to 150 kilometer mass gap in Ukraine and what it predicts for the Pacific Bifurcating airframe production from mission configuration to protect economies of scale Distributed co-production using dormant US industrial capacity instead of new CapEx Engineering a five-vendor redundant supply chain for attritable hardware Reclassifying attritable drones as ammunition and what it unlocks for buyers The Army's Amazon-built UAS marketplace and price transparency in defense procurement Production-consumption models that build surge capacity into peacetime programs

    51 min
  8. EP 100 — Outlander VC's Paige Craig On Funding Defense's Black Sheep Before Anyone Else Will

    Jun 4

    EP 100 — Outlander VC's Paige Craig On Funding Defense's Black Sheep Before Anyone Else Will

    Paige Craig built his first company by sneaking into Baghdad as a private citizen with a fake CNN badge, no government backing, and no contacts, starting with a $5,000 DARPA task and scaling to a $30M program within months. He sold that company and took everything he learned about operating in chaos into Outlander VC, where he writes the first check into founders before revenue, customers, or a real business model exists. His 38-principle framework for evaluating founders, developed after conversations with roughly 4,000 of them, is how he consistently finds the people tier-one funds pass on and turns them into multibillion-dollar outcomes  Paige is a former Marine intel officer who built a private military company from scratch in a war zone, and he now invests at a stage most VCs won't touch. His views on what makes founders succeed and what most investors get wrong are grounded in a track record most people in this space will never have. Topics discussed: The 38-principle founder evaluation framework across vision, intelligence, character, and execution Why character and perseverance outrank strategy, speed, and technical ability at pre-seed Fast execution loops as a primary investment signal before any revenue exists Why pedigree is a poor predictor and how non-standard founders generate outsized returns The veteran founder trap: command-and-control conditioning versus self-directed leadership Why pitch decks and financial forecasts are useless signals at formation stage Pushing defense contract authority to unit level as a fix for the valley of death Unmanned ground vehicles as the most underfunded category in defense tech right now Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube Website

    44 min
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About

The DIB Innovators podcast celebrates the brilliant minds behind innovation within the Defense Industrial Base. In each episode, host and co-founder of RADICL, David Graff will speak with DIB leaders who are driving technological advancements, championing our nation’s security, and shaping the future of defense technology. Brought to you by RADICL — Cybersecurity-as-a-Service purpose-built for small and mid-sized businesses in the Defense Industrial Base. Starting your CMMC journey? RADICL guides and accelerates your compliance—while reducing ransomware and other cyber risks—with a transparent, turn-key solution. www.radicl.com/cmmc_solved

Information

  • Creator
    RADICL
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    108
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © RADICL
  • Show Website
    DIB Innovators

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