A Three-Year Search for Something That Already Existed

In 2018, a program manager at the Defense Innovation Unit needed a commercially available AI tool to automate satellite imagery analysis. The technology existed. Multiple startups had production-ready products sitting on the market.

But none of them were in the government's vendor databases. When the PM searched SAM.gov, all that came back were defense primes offering to build the capability from scratch—at ten times the cost.

The search took three years. The solution was already on the shelf.

An Entire Ecosystem Built Around a Broken Search Bar

The DoD has created an alphabet soup of innovation programs to solve this problem: DIU, AFWERX, NavalX, SOFWERX, xTechSearch, MD5. Each one exists because the traditional acquisition system wasn't designed to discover new vendors. It was designed to manage existing ones.

The root cause is structural. Government procurement databases rely on self-reported profiles, rigid classification codes, and keyword search. A startup describing its product as "computer vision for geospatial analytics" won't appear when a PM searches "automated imagery exploitation"—even though they're describing the same thing.

So the DoD built workarounds: pitch days, challenge competitions, accelerators. These help. But they're band-aids. They depend on the right company walking into the right room at the right time.

What Has to Change

The problem isn't effort—the DoD is spending billions trying to find innovative companies. The problem is infrastructure. Government buyers need search tools that understand capabilities, not just keywords. Tools that can match a stated need ("reduce time-to-detect in ISR workflows") with a company's actual product, regardless of how either side describes it.

Until that infrastructure exists at scale, companies entering the federal market have to meet the system where it is. Learn the vocabulary. Register in the right databases. Show up at the right events. Make yourself findable through the channels buyers actually use.

The companies that get discovered aren't always the best. They're the ones the system can see.

Outrider is building that infrastructure—semantic matching between government needs and commercial capabilities, so three-year searches become three-minute ones.