Case Study: “Skipping the Valley” - the ZeroEyes Story
Overview
ZeroEyes was founded in 2018 by a team of Navy SEALs and technologists: Mike Lahiff, Sam Alaimo, Tim Sulzer, Rob Huberty and Dustin Brooks. The company launched following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas elementary school to prevent future school shootings.
In this episode, we speak with James “JT” Wilkins, a Marine who served fifteen years until he was medically retired. As he prepared to retire, JT had a management consulting offer in hand, and was preparing to move into the analytical lifestyle when COVID hit. What seemed like a disaster at the time turned into a blessing: when the firm pushed his offer back six months, JT knew he had to go back to work. So he discovered defense technology, and a firm called Immersive Wisdom, which gave him his foray into the industry, and an opportunity to continue the national security mission by other means. Over time, as his work brought him into contact with the ZeroEyes team at Tyndall Air Force Base, he decided to join forces with their remarkable team (more on that later).
Company Snapshot
Headcount: 137 Employees (34 engineering)
Fundraising: $44M+ raised
Notable Contracts:
AFWERX Security Flightline of the Future (2021): Tyndall Air Force Base outside of Panama City, Florida, with the option to extend the contract for an additional two years
ZeroEyes Thermal Threat Detection (2023): A.I.-based object detection video analytics with a commercially available thermal sensor UAS platform to proactively identify, track, and respond in real-time to imminent threats that are not visible to the human eye
Via Carahsoft: NASA SEWP V, ITES-SW2
Seven SBIR awards; five of which are Direct to Phase II.
Cooperative contract through NCPA (National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance), an OMNIA Partners company. Through the partnership, NCPA will provide public sector organizations with access to pre-negotiated, discounted contracts for ZeroEyes’ A.I. gun detection technology.
ZeroEyes Approach: A “Noble Mission”
ZeroEyes is a proactive visual gun detection and situational awareness software platform based on computer vision and advanced machine learning AI. It is layered on existing digital security cameras at schools, businesses and government offices. The technology is designed to identify illegally brandished guns and instantly send images to the ZeroEyes Operation Centers (ZOCs), which are staffed by military and law enforcement veterans 24/7/365 for human verification. Once these experts verify that a gun has been identified, they dispatch alerts and provide situational awareness and actionable intelligence, including visual description, gun type and last known location of the shooter, to local staff and law enforcement as quickly as 3 to 5 seconds from detection.
When the ZeroEyes team set out to tackle school shootings, they started by reviewing data on these incidents. They found that over the past 50 years, weapons are almost always brandished for a period of time before first shots are fired. With the goal of saving lives, the team realized that early identification could be the key. Traditionally, active shooter responses are reactive - once the violence begins. But by deploying computer vision on existing infrastructure (video cameras), the team identified an opportunity for a more proactive approach.
Given their founding charter, ZeroEyes began their journey by focusing on education. There were significant hurdles from the jump: privacy, especially in a school setting, with cameras picking up mostly minors, was paramount. While the software focused on drawing bounding boxes around firearms - and only firearms - the team invested early on in a human fail-safe: an operations center that could double-check all verifications to ensure safety and privacy concerns were both met.
Just a few years into their journey, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, hampering ZeroEyes’ growth plans. With schools closing down and no students in the classroom, the market for their product cratered. This forced a pivot: the company needed revenue, and the commercial sector was the logical destination. Commercial entities had “duty of care” requirements to protect customers and employees on their premises. ZeroEyes was a fit: grocery stores, department stores, and other big-box retailers.
It wasn’t long until ZeroEyes got approached by a defense prime about doing subcontract work on a modernization project.
So, like many others we’ve met on the program, it was a commercial business that gave rise to a federal opportunity for the ZeroEyes team.
Entering the Federal Market
When JT first met the ZeroEyes founders, they didn’t have a full-time federal sales team. They were just dabbling in the market, so it was a natural fit.
After they had done some subcontracting work, ZeroEyes spotted another opportunity via the AFWERX Challenge. While technically a market research program, the Challenge initiative paired ZeroEyes with a validated requirement and a user group at Tyndall Air Force Base, to provide flight line security. ZeroEyes brought their commercially-deployed solution to an AFWERX event (which de-risked it for the government), was down-selected into the final 10 vendors, and made the funding cutoff to be deployed operationally to Tyndall. Three years later, ZeroEyes is still going, deployed in production. The Commercial Solutions Offering (CSO) yielded a FAR-based contract, giving ZeroEyes sole-source authority for follow-on work.
It’s worth noting that Tyndall itself is a bit of a rarity: after being destroyed in Hurricane Michael in 2018, the base has been rebuilt from scratch, and has become a sort of testing ground for the Air Force, which has used it to demonstrate what a digitally-connected base of the future might look like. Although this engagement has not led to a widespread deployment of ZeroEyes software, the future is bright given the base’s unique position as a testbed of innovation.
The rarity of a first contract being a production contract should not be lost on anyone! The company still faces challenges - and today has gone back to the SBIR well multiple times - but the ability to hop immediately to production was only possible because of their commercially-validated solution.
“Contracting was the Easy Part”
If the ease of the AFWERX Challenge lulled the ZeroEyes team into a false sense of security, the defense adaptation of their commercial product quickly snapped them out of it. The team had to get an Interim Authority to Test (IATT) and then an Authorization to Operate (ATO) - and even on the same base there were tons of different networks, each owned and operated by different organizations that needed to be placated.
The result was that it took the team nearly seven months after contract award to begin implementation, as they identified leaders, built relationships, earned trust and satisfied regulatory requirements. And that was just the beginning - the first subset of cameras.
Winning them Over
Three things happened at Tyndall that expedited ZeroEyes’ ability to win.
First, the team began bringing in the security defenders, who saw its value, and began to push harder inside the base for its adoption. The “immediate ROI” - in the form of mission achievement for their users - was a game changer. That wouldn’t have happened without JT. Having spent over a year down at Tyndall, JT knew the players. That ZeroEyes was deployed to the same base was an enormous stroke of luck; it allowed him to leverage his network of relationships to get things done when there really was no playbook.
Second, there was an active threat on the installation. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the mere prospect of this sort of attack at home altered the operating pace on base. Almost overnight, the commander ordered that ZeroEyes implementation be sped up and prioritized. The commander made phone calls himself that made things happen.
Third, there was a third party evaluator on site at Tyndall. There’s a school that is semi-serviced by the security forces right outside the base’s front gate, so the third party simulated what an active shooter response would look like, with and without ZeroEyes. The ZeroEyes-assisted simulation cut response time in half. This proof point motivated action, and further built the constituency for change.
Integration
Like other companies we’ve featured on CTV, ZeroEyes focused on doing one thing exceptionally well: detecting brandished firearms off of security cameras. The seconds between when a firearm is detected and when a notification goes out and a response triggered are quite literally the difference between life and death. So the ZE team has become experts at integrating with different reporting and notification systems to make sure their identifications travel rapidly to the point of action. Additionally, they integrate with nearly every camera manufacturer on the market.
Certifications
ZeroEyes proactively invested in certifications to show their mission-readiness, even before the government required them to do so.
Today, the company has earned:
DHS SAFETY Act Designation for a new technology that demonstrates effectiveness during operational testing or through prior use
ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification with Information Security Management System (ISMS) accreditation from the International Standards Organization
BreachBits® BreachRisk Cyber Scoring: cyber prediction, monitoring, and risk reduction
Actively pursuing FedRAMP certification
Looking Forward
In addition to applying for the Air Force’s Strategic Financing Increase (STRATFI) ZeroEyes is a bit different in that they hold a number of SBIR Phase II awards, even with a production deployment. They use these for paid research and development, treating these opportunities much like a venture capitalist treats their portfolio: they are finding needs and deploying their software to meet them, giving the government many opportunities to pull them through. One is for detections from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, another from robotic dogs, and another is for the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept. They are not sure which funding priority may pop at any given time, but they have many lines in the water and are ready for what may come.
At the same time, they are remaining hungry and scrappy. For example, one of their most active efforts is with the Army, even though they currently do not have a contract in place. The Army has a gap around active shooter identification, saw ZeroEyes’ work commercially and with the Air Force, and reached out. As the requirements division said they wanted to pursue it but wanted to learn more, ZeroEyes began exercises with them, deploying their technology in different environments under different circumstances, for users to try. The story is not yet written, but the future is bright.
Case Takeaways
Do one thing incredibly well. Despite the slow growth and challenges from COVID, the team didn’t pivot product - they had strong conviction around their solution. Instead, they pivoted market. Today, they are well-positioned for growth in each market, as conditions become more stable.
Contract award and implementation are not the same thing: The ZeroEyes team learned the hard way that just because a contract is awarded doesn’t mean you get to work. It took 7 months for them to deploy down at Tyndall Air Force Base. Anything a company can do to build relationships and increase understanding of the full array of technical and regulatory requirements before they can deploy is essential to ease the implementation pain.
Driving adoption is a function of relationships: Again, a common theme on CTV. The ZeroEyes team needed to get the security defenders on base advocating for them to get things really starting to move. JT’s relationships with key players at Tyndall was essential to making this happen.
You need a guide -- a mentor or, if you’re at requisite scale, a consulting partner. You can build them from scratch, but you better have a world-beating product that is tested, proven, and sells itself. Everyone else? You better have a guide.
“Semper Gumby”: JT’s Marine aphorism is a perfect summation of the imperative to remain flexible in working with the government. The company learned early on that even when it didn’t meet every single government specification, it could use SBIR to fund adaptations that got them in the fight. They weren’t selling pure off-the-shelf technology, but it was an 80% solution and they were willing to go the extra 20% to get in the game.
Listen to the customer: if you’re trying to go off the shelf and you’re inflexible, especially as a small company, you’re going to have a bad time. If you can solicit, listen and integrate feedback, you’ll be much better off. ZeroEyes didn’t have to guess what their customers wanted: they told them, and the ZeroEyes team listened.
Ep. 03: How ZeroEyes Went Straight to Production with DoD