Early-stage startup scores billion dollar contract

Hey y’all! In this issue:

• a defense-tech company scores a gigantic Pentagon contract

• electric car charging that doesn’t suck

• an Austin-based company building ADUs you can actually afford

A billion dollar contract with one of the biggest buyers on Earth 🇺🇸

Well, $950m to be exact. Picogrid announced this week that they’ve been awarded the $950,000,000 JDAC2 IDIQ contract from the Pentagon.

I wasn’t super familiar with JDAC2 or what exactly an IDIQ contract was before I started researching this story. But before we get to decoding the acronyms, let’s dive into Picogrid and what they’re building.

Picogrid is an early-stage defense-tech company based in El Segundo, California. Their platform is a combination of custom hardware and software that allows military personnel to easily deploy and interact with a wide variety of sensors and devices.

The Lander (pictured above), is a hardware device powered by a solar array and a battery system with up to 14-days of power. It’s just one of Picogrid’s catalogue of devices for powering and controlling remote sensors, cameras, and autonomous systems. The Lander also ships with an onboard AI-ready NVIDIA GPU and integrates with external devices via the Picogrid API.

Picogrid is building rugged hardware capable of withstanding harsh environments, but they’re also building a world-class API to pair with it. Their API will allow external companies, or “capability providers”, to easily integrate their own specialized cameras, sensors, and other devices into Picogrid’s deployed platforms.

Using Picogrid, capability providers will get to skip the hassle of trying to go direct with the defense industry and shortcut their own time to deployment. As more capability providers build on top of Picogrid’s custom hardware/software stack, the value prop of using Picogrid only becomes stronger.

The company is only 2 years old but has already accomplished an insane amount, with hardware deployed at four separate military bases and now a $950m IDIQ contract.

 So what are all these acronyms anyway?