As a co-founder of national security-focused startup nanoMetallix LLC, Jake Laktas understands how hard it can be for an early stage company to gain traction with the U.S. government.
“I got familiar with how bad it sucked to run a company and try to sell to the government, with the barriers that exist in contracting and in even communicating with the government,” he said.
Today, Laktas is on the other side of that experience, helping entrepreneurs navigate those barriers in his role as regional director for National Security Innovation Network (NISN).
Laktas leads the Midwest region for NSIN, a program office of the U.S. Department of Defense focused on fostering collaboration and venture creation among the defense, academic and entrepreneurial sectors. NSIN’s Midwest includes Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, with its “hub city” being St. Louis, where Laktas is based. NSIN appointed Laktas to his regional director position in 2021. Before that, he served as university program officer for NSIN.
In St. Louis, NSIN has hosted and supported programming focused on startup creation, accelerating new technologies and talent development. Its partners locally include the Cortex Innovation Community, downtown entrepreneurship center T-Rex, the Global Center for Cybersecurity @ Cortex and Washington University.
Laktas said NSIN believes the St. Louis region is a key hub for defense-related innovation given that it's home to Scott Air Force Base and the western headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as its growing entrepreneurship efforts in geospatial technology and biosciences.
“The idea is how can NSIN capture the geospatial momentum along with the biomedical skills we already have developed here in the region and leverage that for a nationwide network of defense and national security,” Laktas said.
NSIN has several programs designed to accelerate innovation initiatives. For example, it advances talent development through its X-Force Fellowship, a summer internship that offers college students the chance to work with national security agencies on technology initiatives. In NSIN’s Midwest region, 65 students participated in the X-Force program in fiscal 2021. The organization also seeks to foster collaboration on technology among different entities. It stages hackathon events like its Polar Vortex Hackathon in 2021 that focused on using geospatial technology in the Arctic. The event's partners included Washington University and T-Rex.
Additionally, a key initiative of NSIN is to advance what it calls “dual use” startups, which are companies that have products that can be used by both the government and commercial markets. One such company is locally based Forcyte, a software company focused on wireless power. Forcyte was created through NSIN’s Foundry initiative, an accelerator program aimed at commercializing technologies developed within the Department of Defense.
Another local company that NSIN has been involved with is Infralytiks, a 2021 Arch Grants company that has operations in St. Louis. Through NSIN’s Polar Vortex Hackathon, the machine learning and AI company has developed geospatial and visualization technology designed to help the government navigate the Arctic.
Laktas said NSIN’s multipronged programming offers multiple of ways to engage with businesses, academics and entrepreneurs. That’s a necessity to discover the private sector ideas needed to keep the U.S. national security apparatus on the cutting edge, he said.
“In order to keep up on a global stage with national security innovation, the government has to use private sector and academic partners, and rapidly. We can’t be taking years and years and years to engage with groups. It has to be on a fast pace,” Laktas said.
