Virtualitics targets public sector customers with OpenAI partnership
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By
Frank Konkel
Virtualitics is the latest company to partner with a frontier AI firm to enhance its existing software suite.
Pasadena-based artificial intelligence solutions firm Virtualitics and frontier AI company OpenAI announced a memorandum of understanding Wednesday to jointly work together to improve mission outcomes for customers with complex, critical workloads — including those within the Defense Department and civilian federal agencies.
The collaboration integrates OpenAI’s frontier AI technology with Virtualitics’ agentic AI platform, Iris, which has several customers in defense and among Fortune 500 firms. Virtualitics Chief Product Officer Aakash Indurkhya said the aim is to pair OpenAI’s frontier AI technology with Virtualitics’ expertise in analytics and AI agent development to create more robust AI agents and enhanced scalability for customers in government and regulated industries.
“This partnership with OpenAI is taking their frontier reasoning models and installing them into the AI agents we’re building,” Indurkhya said. “Users are already pining for this.”
In a statement, Virtualitics CEO Michael Amori said the partnership “lets us pair our readiness expertise with best-of-breed models, while maintaining the trust, transparency and rigor our customers require.”
Indurkhya said OpenAI’s models have the potential to enhance work performed under the company’s current contracts. In one example, the company’s platform is used by the U.S. Marine Corps for predictive maintenance and assessing risk around machine components breaking, tying those data sets to resourcing. Partnering with OpenAI, he said, is “unleashing frontier-level reasoning against those types of tools.”
The move comes as the Pentagon embraces AI and agentic AI agents — tools that perform tasks without human intervention at each turn. OpenAI is one of several frontier AI firms to burst into the public sector market since 2024.
Last July, OpenAI, along with Anthropic, Google and xAI, each received $200 million contracts from the Pentagon to supply AI tools and models. Those companies and others have also discounted their software to government customers through deals through the General Services Administration’s OneGov strategy and served as partners through the administration’s USAi platform. Through this partnership, existing Virtualitics customers will have access to OpenAI’s capabilities as they become available to government customers at increasingly higher security networks.
“Organizations operating in mission-critical environments require AI they can trust,” said Andrew Keene, Head of Government Partnerships at OpenAI. “Our collaboration with Virtualitics allows for richer, context-specific results supporting effective use of AI where readiness and accuracy matter most.”