April isn’t over, but Design Interactive Inc. already has pulled in $11 million worth of new contract awards this month.
The Orlando-based training technology company secured multiple multimillion-dollar contracts this month to work on extended-reality projects. Many of them have opportunities for follow-on funding, setting up Design Interactive to bring more high-tech, high-wage work to Central Florida.
Founded in 1998, Design Interactive offers extended-reality training content for the aviation, defense, manufacturing, transportation and health care industries. Extended reality, also known as XR, is a broad category that includes different forms of combined real-and-virtual environments, including augmented, virtual and mixed reality.
Design Interactive’s $11 million month backs up the company’s focus on XR solutions for public and private sector clients, said CEO Kay Stanney. “Through our products and services, companies can strategically accelerate XR adoption and start realizing return on investment immediately in terms of increased productivity, safety and employee engagement.”
The new projects include a $3.8 million contract award from the U.S.Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighter Medical Research Program. As part of this contract, Design Interactive will get its AUGMED Mobile product — which allows for anytime, anywhere battlefield medical trauma training — operational.
Another highlight of Design Interactive’s recent award wins is a Department of Defense deal that gives the firm more than $2 million to study the use of XR technology in 5G and edge computing.
These contracts also include "options," which means the customers can add more products or services to the original orders.If all options are exercised, it would double the pool of awards Design Interactive potentially has access to, said Chief Operations Officer Matt Archer.
Plus, Design Interactive has the ability to land more dollars through a matching fund program. Government customers can match funding from other government, or even commercial, clients if they have a similar need to what the other client is funding. This enables Design Interactive to more efficiently work on the projects simultaneously for both clients, Archer said.
Meanwhile, XR technology is projected to become increasingly important in the defense sector. The Department of Defense spends roughly $14 billion every year on synthetic training tech, according to research and consulting giant Deloitte. The defense sector's augmented-reality space alone is projected to be worth $1.7 billion by 2025.
“The focus on improving skills faster and at lower costs is seen to have led to a rise in the deployment of digital reality in defense departments globally,” the report read.
That’s good news for Orlando’s $6 billion modeling, simulation and training industry. The sector, which employs more than 30,000 people in the region, includes many companies working on augmented-reality technologies for the Department of Defense.
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