TOP 100: LMI's commercial tech approach hinges on the business model

For all the conversations about federal agencies purchasing and adopting more commercial technology, they inevitably turn to how problems that exist in the government ecosystem simply do not exist in commercial markets.

But as LMI and Alex Adamczyk see the world, that dynamic does not need to interfere with the use of commercial-like techniques and business models to develop and integrate tech tools for agencies.

“No one else in the world outside the government has this problem, that doesn’t mean we still can’t build software the same way a VC (venture-backed company) would talk to users, understand it, don’t charge them anything, build the prototypes, see how they like it,” said Adamczyk, LMI’s vice president of sales engineering and rapid prototyping. “Once you have a working tool, then a customer buys that, funds it, buys a license to trust it, and you can still capture all of the goodness from the government perspective of de-risking the technology.”

LMI hits Position No. 73 in the 2026 Washington Technology Top 100 rankings, up four spots from the prior year, with $449.3 million in unclassified prime contract obligations.

One fundamental question arising out of the government’s push for more commercial tech zeroes in on the customer’s tolerance of failure. In essence, is it possible for agencies to get a 100% solution and buy it in a commercial-like manner?

Adamczyk pointed to LMI’s work with the Army on its Next-Generation Command and Control effort, also called NGC2, as a prime example of where the answer to that question is “Yes.”

NGC2 is the Army’s major modernization effort aimed at replacing fragmented battlefield systems with a single, common baseline configuration for communications and data sharing.

Anduril is the prime contractor for establishing that data baseline and worked with LMI to help carry out a rapid application development pilot. LMI provided its SHEPRD force protection app that is designed to fuse asset data, terrain effects and threat information into a three-dimensional visualization.

The need to defend people and infrastructure is unique to government, but Adamczyk said LMI followed the commercial business model and approach by talking to users on the ground and discovering what their needs are.

This took place during the Army’s Ivy Sting exercises for testing, evaluating and refining emerging digital battlefield tech in high-pressure scenarios.

“They brought (SHEPRD) out to Ivy Sting, they tried it, the users gave a bunch of feedback on the tool and the government spent zero dollars,” Adamczyk said. “All of that was our investment dollars up front.”

Five weeks later, the Army asked LMI to return for another Ivy Sting exercise and still spent nothing on the technology. Another five weeks later, the Army asked to put the software tool into classified networks.

Adamczyk said that two years ago, that timeline would have been “an impossible ask for the government.”

Fast forward to today and the landscape is very different with LMI’s investments in the software itself, its DevSecOps development environment and experience in building a tech company-like culture.

“(It means that we have all these people that already know how to build secure applications, the tooling to build secure applications, the process to get containerized software hooked onto a secret network, the people who already have all the credentials,” Adamczyk said. “So when the customer said ‘Can you be on (classified) in five weeks,’ we said ‘Of course, absolutely.’”

LMI’s tech-focused culture has spread out from its Forge technology studio that was an incubator for helping employees explore and test new ideas. Adamczyk described Forge as more of an “art of the possible exploration” hub versus one that focuses on production.

LMI has since reorganized itself to make Forge more of a company-wide effort that puts human-centered design, rapid prototyping and idea exploration at the forefront.

When Forge was its own thing, only a select few were chosen to be part of an innovation team and others were left out.

“The new model is, everyone is expected to do this, everyone should be doing it,” Adamczyk said. “We're giving you the tools, we're giving you the technology to go do it. Whether you are on the rapid prototyping team full-time to do this, or out on client site, we're all going to do this the same way.”

( The July 20 episode of our WT 360 podcast will feature the full conversation with Adamczyk that includes his explanations about Forge’s evolution, the bigger picture of how LMI seeks to align its tech and business roadmaps with those of its customers, as well as what makes for a true culture of innovation )