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PODCAST

DIB Innovators

The DIB Innovators podcast celebrates the brilliant minds behind innovation within the Defense Industrial Base. In each episode, host and co-founder of RADICL, David Graff will speak with DIB leaders who are driving technological advancements, championing our nation’s security, and shaping the future of defense technology. Brought to you by RADICL — Cybersecurity-as-a-Service purpose-built for small and mid-sized businesses in the Defense Industrial Base. Starting your CMMC journey? RADICL guides

technology

All Episodes

00:38:58

EP 123 — Overmatch Ventures' Morgan Hitzig On The...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/10/01

If 85% of defense M&A exits land below $100 million in enterprise value, why are so many defense tech founders raising at valuations unmoored from the fundamentals? Morgan Hitzig, General Partner at Overmatch Ventures, thinks the answer lies in who founders take money from and whether those investors understand budget cycles, colors of money, and what it takes to scale production.Morgan walks Dave through how Overmatch deploys its oversubscribed $250 million fund across deep tech, defense, and

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00:41:09

EP 122 — AEVEX's Manan Patel On The Modular Drone...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/09/24

Manan Patel deployed to Iraq as a civilian engineer and mission commander on airborne ISR platforms, then left the government lab with no business plan to start Special Operations Solutions. A decade later, private equity merged his company with two others to form AEVEX, which went public on the NYSE and has delivered over 6,000 autonomous platforms.As CTO, Manan explains how AEVEX's CompassCore hardware-software stack runs across every platform size and domain, enabling mass production by

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00:35:51

EP 121 — Tidal Flight's Jude Augustine On Building...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/09/17

Seaplane design hasn't changed since the 1950s. Jude Augustine, Co-Founder and CEO of Tidal Flight, is building Polaris, a hybrid electric amphibious aircraft designed to turn a four-hour coastal trip into two hours door to door while giving the military runway independence in the Pacific. Polaris is the launchpad for Tidal to grow into a next-generation aircraft manufacturer with a vision for aircraft across categories.Before even raising a seed round, Jude and his Georgia Tech co-founders

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00:38:03

EP 120 — Crow Industries' James Crowell On Why The...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/09/10

James Crowell is an expert in extreme environment robotics who spent the first decade of his career developing and deploying polar, volcanic, and space systems at NASA, JPL, and research laboratories before founding Crow Industries in 2018. His team designs Fenris, a family of intelligent UGVs built for defense, mining, and eventually lunar and Martian surface operations, all from the premise that designing for environments with no GPS, limited comms, and no human access produces systems that

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01:02:14

EP 119 — Baker Institute's Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes On...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/09/03

Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes drilled the first unconventional wells in Argentina for ExxonMobil, built a nickel mining company in Western Australia, then served as DOE Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials. Today she advises on critical mineral policy as a Nonresident Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute and invests across the critical supply chain through her family office, Smoketree Resources.Ashley lays out a three-step framework for breaking Western dependence on

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00:35:44

EP 118 — CisLunar Industries' Gary Calnan On How a...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/08/27

Gary Calnan, CEO and Co-Founder of CisLunar Industries, built power electronics to melt metal in orbit. A research partner noticed the same hardware could reshape electric propulsion. That pivot turned a space debris recycling startup into a power electronics company with a test platform on a NASA mission and Lockheed Martin and Safran serving as subcontractors on its Space Force program.Gary tells Dave Graff how a finance career, nine weeks at the International Space University, and $4.7 million in

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00:45:24

EP 117— NODA AI's Phil Duong On Building Mission...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/08/18

Phil Duong, CEO and Co-Founder of NODA AI, is building the mission command layer for autonomous forces that nobody else is focused on. His company orchestrates multi-vendor platforms into coordinated effects the way a JTAC pairs aircraft with targets.A Marine Corps naval aviator and JTAC turned defense tech founder, Phil earned NODA AI a $100 million Department of War award to scale mission command for autonomous forces after years refining a thesis on software-defined effects.Topics discussed:-

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00:39:07

EP 116 — Carbonix's Dario Valenza On Building 10-Hour...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/08/13

How do you build a drone that flies 10 hours, takes off without a runway, and earns the first beyond visual line of sight certification for its class? Start with a decade of America's Cup yacht racing and a fixation on making structures lighter and faster.Dario Valenza, Founder of Carbonix, breaks down how his team applied carbon fiber composites and first principles design to build a long-range VTOL aircraft now scanning pipelines, power lines, and mine sites. With defense traction including

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00:33:27

EP 115 — WAR Inc's Jon Williams On Building a Defense...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/08/11

Jon Williams took ownership of technical data packs for munitions from 40 millimeter to 1,000 pound bombs. WAR Inc. is building a single facility where raw materials go in one end and a complete round comes out the other.A combat Marine who served in Fallujah and Sangin before stints at Microsoft and a professional race team, Jon breaks down how frontline feedback from Ukraine drives new munitions development and why American-owned manufacturing is non-negotiable for the DIB.Topics discussed:-

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00:49:30

EP 114 — Saronic Technologies' Vibhav Altekar On...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/08/06

What happens when you design ships for full autonomy from day one instead of retrofitting crewed vessels? At Saronic Technologies, it meant removing living quarters, plumbing, and human-centric systems, then building navigational autonomy and automated ship systems capable of operating 30 to 40 days without human contact.Vibhav Altekar, Co-Founder and CTO, walks Dave through building over 300 Corsairs in under two years, betting early on fully passive sensing for contested RF environments, and the

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00:38:52

EP 113 — 3Wire Partners' Anita Antenucci On Why 80%...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/30

Anita Antenucci, Founder and Managing Partner of 3Wire Partners, has spent three decades and roughly five hundred deals watching the defense capital stack evolve. Venture capital typically funds ten companies knowing only one or two will survive. As more defense suppliers depend on VC money, government risks inheriting that attrition, potentially losing 80% of those providers. Anita explains why proving a prototype in the field is scarcer than the ability to scale, where she sees the strongest deal

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00:33:28

EP 112 — Persistent Systems' Jon Patrick On Winning...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/23

Persistent Systems won a $120 million tactical networking award without a program of record. Their Wave Relay MANET served as the network backbone during Project Convergence Capstone 5, a combined arms breach exercise that became the precursor to the Army's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) architecture.Jon Patrick, VP of Business Development for Army and SOCOM at Persistent Systems, spent 26 years in DoD acquisition before crossing to industry. He tells Dave how two-year tranche buys

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00:27:51

EP 111 — Vision Miner's Rob Lent On 9 Years Of...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/17

Rob Lent, Co-Founder and COO of Vision Miner, has spent nine years making high-performance polymer 3D printing accessible to companies that used to need quarter-million-dollar machines. Materials like PEEK and ULTEM have been used in industry for over 40 years, but printing them in-house was out of reach for most.Rob walks Dave through bootstrapping from a bedroom printer to manufacturing their own IDEX machine in Ukraine, surviving eight months of wartime shipping shutdowns, and designing hardware

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00:39:56

EP 110 — AdlerAerospace’s Wilhelm Meya On The Broken...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/14

Wilhelm Meya spent his first career building linguistic technology. Then he pivoted into aerospace, founded AdlerAerospace, and started integrating battle-tested Ukrainian and European drone technologies for U.S. and allied defense customers. Two and a half years in, the company builds heavy-lift UAVs, autonomous interceptors, and counter-UAS systems, and was selected for the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program and the DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge.Wilhelm tells Dave Graff why the only real answer

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00:34:34

EP 109— Skyways' Isaac Roberts On Mass-Producing...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/09

Isaac Roberts spent four years in the Navy, built and sold a computer vision company, co-founded a robotics startup, and then joined Skyways to tackle the missing middle in autonomous aviation: long-range cargo drones big enough to matter but small enough to mass-produce. With a $37 million Air Force contract to reach full rate production, Skyways is building hybrid electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) with 1,200 nautical mile range and modular payloads for contested

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00:20:15

EP 108 — Clear-Com's Jonathan Sorensen On Building...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/07

Jonathan Sorensen went from working live events at Red Rocks and broadcast engineering for the Colorado Avalanche to solving military communication challenges at Clear-Com. As a Solutions Engineer for Military, Aerospace and Government, he brings a signal flow mindset to full duplex, real time comms built for high-stakes operations.Clear-Com's commercial business drives product development that feeds directly into defense. Their newest FreeSpeak Cell beltpack runs on 5G LTE and private CBRS

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00:40:29

EP 107 — Hidden Level's Antoinett Dufort On The...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/07/02

The defense industrial base has no shortage of innovation. It has a scaling problem. At Hidden Level , the team went from building prototype passive RF sensors to producing operational systems at scale. The operational playbook behind that leap started when Antoinett Dufort joined as employee number 20.Now VP of Operations, Antoinett shares how she built manufacturing, supply chain, and quality systems with future scale in mind from day one, and the decisions that positioned Hidden Level to meet

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00:16:39

EP 106 — Space Copy's Madison Feehan On Building...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/06/30

Space Copy builds ruggedized 3D printers that take in raw local materials, soil, sand, scrap metal, ceramics, even simulated moon dust, and print infrastructure on-site in the most extreme environments on Earth and in space. With 300 pre-orders, a NASA contract, and a planned lunar deployment by 2031, they are eliminating the need for external supply chains entirely.Madison Feehan, Founder and CEO of Space Copy, tells Dave how she went from a part-time role at NASA at 16 to founding a company whose

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00:50:07

EP 105 — Delta.g's Tony Lowe on Taking Quantum...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/06/25

Delta.g built a quantum gravity gradiometer that detects underground voids, tunnels, and buried targets in 200 milliseconds per reading, a capability conventional gravity sensors cannot match. Legacy tools are so sensitive to environmental noise that they require extended settling time to separate signal from background, and even then the gravitational reading can be indistinguishable from interference. Delta.g's solution is gradiometry: two stacked identical quantum gravimeters, both built on

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00:21:12

EP 104 — Impac Systems Engineering's Justin Smart On...

DIB Innovators ·

2026/06/23

Justin Smart has spent 30 years in additive manufacturing. Now at Impac Systems Engineering, he helps manufacturers adopt 3D printing for production-scale applications, including a continuous carbon fiber process that reduces an aerospace component's weight by 78% while matching the original's load capacity and vibration modulus.Justin tells Dave how photopolymers went from sun-sensitive prototypes to engineering-grade plastics in five years, how metal printing costs dropped to a fifth of

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124 results

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