How Steampunk's design intelligence focus stood out to MetroStar

Before MetroStar Systems entered the portfolio of its private equity owner, the enterprise IT and digital transformation specialist worked to solidify its strategy for diversifying into defense and intelligence programs.

MetroStar received a minority investment from Blue Delta Capital Partners in 2021 and also established a board of directors at that time, 12 years after the company decided to stretch itself beyond the traditional civilian core.

“We put a strategy together of how we wanted our mission identity to change as a business,” Ali Manouchehri, MetroStar CEO and a co-founder, told us. “The ideas were always around data.”

Veritas Capital acquired MetroStar in the fall of 2025 through the PE firm’s Vantage fund for the market’s middle tier, after which owner and company both laid out a strategy for what 2030 would look like.

As with any private equity-owned contractor, MetroStar also looked at what would work for it on the acquisition front. Manouchehri said they looked at a dozen options over the past seven months, but Steampunk emerged as the standout to join forces with.

MetroStar and Steampunk announced their combination on Aug. 4 with the intent of bringing artificial intelligence, digital transformation and user-centered delivery work under one roof. The combined company now employs around 1,600 people with estimated annual revenue of roughly $500 million.

Why link up with Steampunk for this new iteration of the strategy? Manouchehri described Steampunk’s unique attribute as design intelligence, a framework the company uses to build digital and technical offerings for federal agencies.

The idea behind design intelligence is to merge agile management, user experience design and the DevSecOps software development practice with the goal of keeping people at the center of tech transformation efforts. Steampunk stood up its first design intelligence studio in 2020 to aid this work.

“It’s a Venn diagram where you’ve got elements of the delivery approaches, the design approaches and the people approaches,” Manouchehri said. “At the edges are the unique pieces of the techniques Steampunk has mastered over the years.

“If the customer wants to give birth to a product, its everything around that and the design intelligence to make sure the product is kicked off right,” he added.

A new world order of government tech acquisition, where fixed-price and outcome-based contracting is at the center of attention, means all of those elements have to be in sync from the start. Contractor and customer alike have to be on the same page as to what the risks and requirements are.

Manouchehri recalled the first time a mentor described the differences between time-and-materials contracts, which have been a traditional means of acquiring tech services, and firm-fixed-price pacts.

“They’ll give you T&M because they don’t understand, they don’t have all the requirements identified, so they’re going to reduce the risk by giving you T&M. FFP, they have a pretty good idea of what they want to build,” Manouchehri recounted.

Under the fixed-price construct, the risks shift to the contractor to make sure there is common alignment between them and the client.

“Design intelligence comes in to help bridge those gaps of understanding of delivery,” Manouchehri said. “If you start with people and have an understanding where the product can go, then you have the potential and the potential will give you that predictability.”