Just over five months after naming a pair of local leaders as new members of its executive team, RS21 tapped an East Coast engineer to take over as its new chief technology officer with an eye on product growth.
Jamie Ter Beest, the Albuquerque data and analytics company's new CTO, spent the past decade-and-a-half working at national tech consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton — most recently as the company's chief engineer. That work was centered in the New England area, around Boston and Rhode Island, and a bit farther south in Virginia.
But Ter Beest said he has a previous connection to New Mexico, and Los Alamos, specifically, where he lived while interning at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). While a LANL intern he helped build custom components for a 120-megawatt nuclear fusion amplifier.
While much of his work at RS21 will be remote, Ter Beest said his role will take him back and forth between New Mexico and Rhode Island, in addition to other markets.
"His deep experience in innovation and implementation, especially in the federal government and defense space, opens up a realm of possibilities, expanding our reach and deepening our ability to provide customers with actionable, data-driven insight and cutting-edge capabilities," Charles Rath, RS21's CEO, said in about Ter Beest in a statement.
Some of the areas Ter Beest highlighted while talking about RS21's work include digital twin models and artificial intelligence-based satellite monitoring. He's also had experience in a specific area of technology called large language models, or machine learning algorithms that rely on massive datasets.
"I think that's an extremely interesting future business endeavor that I think we're looking into," Ter Beest told Albuquerque Business First.
A large part of what Ter Beest hopes to accomplish at RS21 is helping the company establish a "product track," or a streamlined way to take technological innovations at the company and turn them into prototypes and then, eventually, marketable products. That was a point echoed by Matthew Ennis, RS21's chief product and strategy officer, this summer.
"It's just working with the right government entities that are helping to shape those innovations," Ter Beest said. "They're the first buyers of that innovation."
RS21 previously landed a federal contract for the AI-based satellite technology Ter Beest referenced and presented some of its health equity focused work at the White House late last year. More government-related work could come soon, too, thanks to the company being named among dozens of other small businesses on a $50 billion contract vehicle through the National Institutes of Health.
Besides bringing on the two new executives earlier this year, RS21 also, more recently, landed its first bit of venture capital through a $3 million investment from California-based VC Thayer Ventures. That money will be used as an "accelerant for the company," Ennis, the chief product and strategy officer, said at the time. Some of the funds could go toward hiring, too; Ennis added that RS21 wants to create 30 new jobs over the next couple of years.
"I'm just really excited help RS21 grow and be a prime example of an Albuquerque-based business that basically has a spotlight on it to help Albuquerque grow," Ter Beest told Business First.
