NEW YORK — Accrete said it won a five-year, multi-million dollar Production Operational Technology software licensing contract from the U.S. Department of Defense for Argus, the company’s threat detecting AI software.
The exact contract value and deal terms were not disclosed, but the New York-based company said in a statement that the product is “worth tens of millions of dollars.”
The Defense Innovation Unit, which former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter established with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to strengthen U.S. national security by accelerating adoption of commercial technology, awarded Accrete with an Other Transaction Authority Prototype contract in 2020. The DoD accepted the Argus prototype within 15 months, and Accrete said it worked closely with the DIU and the DoD to transition the OTA Prototype contract into a multi-year Production OT AI software licensing deal.
Argus analyzes the open-source web to predict anomalous and potentially illicit behavior hiding in plain sight, according to the company. It performs work that would otherwise require thousands of intelligence analysts and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in areas critical to national security such as supply chain risk management, intellectual property theft, social media intelligence and insider threat detection.
“Whereas nuclear proliferation threatened entire populations, AI proliferation individualizes warfare by manipulating targeted groups through digital means,” said Accrete Founder, Chairman and CEO Prashant Bhuyan in the statement. “As a prime defense contractor licensing configurable dual-use AI software directly to the DoD, Accrete is in a unique position to scale its business with the Defense, Intelligence, and Special Operations communities, as well as other government and enterprise customers.”
The software uses artificial intelligence to read, understand and learn from dynamic, unstructured data, including news, blogs, think tank publications, strategy papers, social media chatter, financial filings, microprocessor manuals and binaries in multiple languages, according to Accrete. It also finds relationships between entities, models influence and detects bad behaviors that are too complex for humans to identify.
William Wall, who leads Accrete’s federal sales subsidiary, Accrete AI Government, formerly served as a U.S. Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and with the Joint Special Operations Command. Zachary Smith, Accrete AI Government’s Program Manager, is a retired special agent who spent most of his 23-year Air Force career focused on countering human, technical and cyber-based threats.
