BigBear pushes into agentic AI arena with $250M acquisition

BigBear.ai has agreed to acquire a generative artificial intelligence platform provider for $250 million in a move to position for opportunities in future secure deployments of AI models and agentic systems.

Founded in 2023, Ask Sage designed its platform to help organizations that work with classified and sensitive information use AI systems that can take independent action to achieve a goal. This is what observers refer to as agentic AI, where systems act as virtual assistants to users while completing tasks without constant intervention.

During BigBear’s third quarter earnings call Monday, chief executive Kevin McAleenan said the company is prioritizing “disruptive AI mission solutions for national security” in the current iteration of its strategy.

For BigBear, this also means a focus on scalable AI deployments with information security at the center of them. Government agencies are more interested in autonomous AI agents than ever before, but also want controls on them and especially for defense and intelligence missions.

“With Ask Sage, are positioning ourselves to deliver secure AI agents that actually act on mission data and drive outcomes at the highest classification levels and do it repeatedly across defense, security agencies and the defense industrial base,” McAleenan said.

Ask Sage’s platform is built as a model-agnostic product and holds the highest-level accreditation under FedRAMP, the government-wide program for authorizing cloud computing services and applications.

McAleenan described the Ask Sage user base across government as covering 100,000 operators on 16,000 teams for 27 agencies. Hundreds of commercial companies have also acquired the Ask Sage platform, he added.

Nicolas Chaillan, Ask Sage’s founder and a former chief software officer for the Air Force and Space Force, has agreed to join BigBear as chief technology officer via the transaction.

“(Chaillan) will focus on enhancing our broader portfolio and increasing the efficiency and velocity of our product development and innovation, while powering us forward as an AI-first company across all of our functions,” McAleenan said. “By integrating Ask Sage with BigBear.ai, we are creating an offering the market has been asking for, a secure integrated AI platform that connects software, data and mission services in one place.”

BigBear also plans to incorporate its own products into the Ask Sage platform with the goal of offering users more applications and data sources, plus automation techniques.

“We plan to wrap our integration in mission services around the applications and agents deployed on Ask Sage, giving customers not only the AI capability, but also the deployment, tuning and change management support to ensure that they maximize the value potential of the offering,” McAleenan said. “Ask Sage’s application marketplace gives us a faster route to market for future offerings, whether built organically through partnerships or via acquisition. It's become a distribution channel for innovation.”

All parties involved in the transaction expect it to close before the end of the first quarter of 2026.