While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy.
How so? Well, the Navy’s chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups. The efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be smarter about where it’s committing dollars.
“We’re more open for business and partnerships than we’ve ever been before,” Fanelli told TechCrunch in a recent Zoom interview. “We’re humble and listening more than before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want that to be a partnership.”
Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy’s innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production. “Your granddaddy’s government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in,” Fanelli said. “Now it’s a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service.”
In one recent case, the Navy went from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Mass.-based cybersecurity startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn’t stored in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via’s clients is the U.S. Air Force.)
The Navy’s new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a “horizon” model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey’s innovation framework. Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting, and scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with problems rather than predetermined solutions.
“Instead of specifying, ‘Hey, we’d like this problem solved in a way that we’ve always had it,’ we just say, ‘We have a problem, who wants to solve this, and how will you solve it?’” Fanelli said.
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Fanelli’s drive to overhaul Navy tech is personal. Originally a scholarship cadet in the Air Force studying electrical engineering, he was disqualified from military service due to a lung issue. Determined to serve anyway, he chose the Navy over private sector offers more than 20 years ago because he “wanted to be around people in uniform.” Since then, his career has spanned roles across defense, intelligence, DARPA, and open source initiatives, before returning to the Department of the Navy.
The change he’s overseeing is opening doors to companies that previously never considered government work and may have thought it a waste of time to try. Fanelli points, for example, to one competition run through the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), wherein the Navy expected a handful of bidders for a niche cybersecurity challenge but received nearly 100 responses – many from companies that had never worked with the DoD before but were already solving similar problems in the private sector.
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