Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] on Tuesday said it has invested in Reveal Technology
, a small company developing visual analytics and artificial intelligence that can rapidly assist squad-level forces with threat awareness, 3-D mapping, tactical route planning and other actionable information disconnected from the grid.
The strategic investment adds to Booz Allen’s Digital Battlespace platform, which the company stood up about a year ago to focus on supporting interconnected, joint all domain operations to give warfighters decision superiority. The platform includes three subaccounts, one focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, another on command and control, and the third is special missions.
The investment in Reveal, fits into the special missions area, which is focused on special forces and dismounted warriors and the manned and unmanned platforms that support them at brigade and below levels, which is the “pointy end of the spear,” Joel Dillon, Booz Allen’s senior vice president of digital battlespace special missions, told Defense Daily.
“We’re working on creating novel solutions that are really going to accelerate the decision-cycle and give our warfighters decision superiority, which is also called decision advantage,” he said in an interview on Monday before the official announcement of the investment in Reveal.
Reveal combines employees with technical know-how, combat and special operations experience, ingredients that make them attractive for the investment along with the technology they are developing, Dillon said.
The size of the investment in Reveal wasn’t disclosed.
Farsight is Reveal’s software product that the San Francisco-based company says allows tactical operators in the field to gather intelligence on their own without being connected to a communications grid and receiving regular updates from higher-ups. A video on the company’s website shows a squad of soldiers using a handheld unmanned aircraft system to visually conduct surveillance of an area, and then use the Farsight software to turn the video into actionable intelligence displayed on a standard DoD small, rugged tablet device.
The actionable intelligence includes real-time 2-D maps and near-real-time 3-D maps of the area surveilled during the UAS flight, which combined with the AI features of the software enable line-of-sight analysis, the ability to evaluate enemy and friendly points of view from any position on the map, detailed terrain assessments, route selection for the squad to help avoid detection, and even pinpoint hot landing zones on the ground or on buildings for helicopters based on a particular aircraft’s characteristics.
Reveal also says that it is developing Farsight to support future Army technologies such as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System to allow users to see the maps and analytics on their augmented reality goggles.
Dillon said the investment in Reveal will assist Booz Allen with its own strategy around special missions, provide additional capabilities, help “them shape their technology roadmap so that it aligns more closely to what we’re doing,” and potentially enter into more exclusive teaming arrangements with them.
The investment in Reveal follows a strategic investment Booz Allen announced in March in Synthetaic, a small company developing AI-based technology to rapidly identify items of interest in imagery datasets.