How Lynteris centers its tech on 'left of bang'

Left of bang, or left of boom depending on which military professional or observer one speaks to, seems to be where many of the most difficult challenges facing operators take place.

Whereas the problems of the past mostly focused on the right side of those chains of events, or after the conflicts start.

“The hardest problems of warfare for most of human history were delivering weapons systems to targets, and today we can do that with relative ease,” Lyntris’ chief executive Brian Morrison told WT. “The harder problems (of today) have almost left in time. It’s identifying targets, correlating information about those targets, presenting information about those targets, coming up with a firing solution, and then launching.”

Enter Lynteris, a newly-formed defense technology company that designs its software and hardware offerings to cover the entire left side of the chain. Lynteris emerges following the combination of Accelint Holdings and Vitesse Systems announced Thursday.

Financial terms of the move were not disclosed, but Lynteris is touting an active presence across roughly 200 programs at the U.S. Defense Department and allied partners. Lynteris is owned by private equity firm Trive Capital.

As Morrison described it, the heritage Accelint and Vitesse businesses focused on different aspects of that left side.

Accelint centered on what he called the “make sense and act” part, which starts with work to identify what the threats are and then come up with a firing solution to mitigate them.

Vitesse was more about “sense and make sense,” which Morrison said involves how operators render the threats and firing solutions in a command-and-control system for making decisions.

“If you think of the connected battlespace as sense, make sense and act – We took a company that was ‘sense and make sense’ and combined it with a company that was ‘make sense and act,” Morrison said.

The combined company’s product portfolio covers areas such as mission systems, decision support, autonomy, command-and-control, sensing hardware, radio frequency technologies, thermal management, and power and subsystem integration.

Naturally, artificial intelligence is an underlying capability that feeds into all of those products.

Morrison said Lynteris and its heritage businesses have been involved in the defense AI landscape for close to 15 years and sought to focus on specific use cases, such as swarming autonomy. This involves how multiple autonomous vehicles operate collectively, but in a decentralized manner, to achieve complex tasks without needing constant human intervention.

As Lyntris and Morrison see the world, out-of-the-box and general purpose AI tools become less useful as they get closer to the edge.

“There are just realities that we have to think about when deploying AI in life or death situations, such as combat, that don't exist in commercial AI applications,” Morrison said. “Things like rules of engagement, levels of force, contested digital environments where you may be jammed or lose contact with a platform. The AI needs to be sophisticated enough to allow that platform to act in a truly autonomous way that distinguishes between blue forces (friendly) and red forces (the foe).”

Lyntris also enters the market amid a period where DOD is pushing for more rapid prototyping and fielding of technologies before they are 100%-ready, but sees iteration while in use as the way to get there.

The company has opted to center much of its strategy around being a merchant supplier to larger prime contractors. Morrison said Lyntris views that status as helping it work on tech development in those kinds of quicker cycles DOD wants.

“If we were to pursue a position of being solely a platform prime, we'd be forced to make tradeoffs about accepting suboptimal solutions,” Morrison said. “We resist the temptation to be vertically integrating at all opportunities.”