Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] on Tuesday said its ventures arm has made a strategic investment in Second Front Systems
(2F), which is focused on accelerating commercial software solutions into the federal national security space.
The value of the investment was not disclosed and comes out of a $100 million fund Booz Allen’s set up in 2022 for its Booz Allen Ventures unit.
2F, which is based in Delaware, provides its Game Warden DevSecOps platform to commercial companies to help them quickly and securely test and evaluate their software to gain accreditation and compliance for Defense Department customers.
Booz Allen said the investment in 2F will allow its customers to benefit from the commercial software supported by Game Warden, leveraging Booz Allen’s integration expertise and federal customer network with 2F’s relationship with commercial firms. Booz Allen said it usually takes commercial software companies two years and between $1.5 million to $2 million to go through the accreditation process and receive an authority to operate for government customers.
“Delayed access to secure computing environments and authority to operate continue to limit the U.S. government’s ability to rapidly respond to urgent needs,” Steve Escaravage, executive vice president and leader of Booz Allen’s Digital Battlespace portfolio, said in a statement. “The Game Warden platform provides a novel solution to mitigate these risks, thereby increasing the universe of software capabilities available to our engineering teams and ultimately reducing the time to mission impact. Our investment in Second Front means we can now have day one mission impact when its needed most.”
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Moore Strategic Ventures also participated in the funding round, which is separate from a $40 million Series B investment round that 2F announced last November that was led by NEA and included Moore (Defense Daily, Nov. 28, 2023).
Booz Allen will join 2F’s board as an non-voting member.