June 8, 2023
McLean, VA – Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) today announced that its corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, LLC, has made a strategic investment in Shift5, the onboard data company. Shift5 brings order to the complexity of onboard data, providing observability, critical insights, and cybersecurity protection to the world’s most critical commercial and military fleets and weapon systems. This is the first investment by Booz Allen Ventures aligned with the firm’s National Cyber business, which uses a comprehensive view of the cyber landscape and intelligence-grade tradecraft to unlock stronger defensive solutions and deploy full-spectrum cyber capabilities with confidence, precision, and speed.
“The nation’s adversaries view the U.S. federal government, intelligence agencies, the military, and all critical infrastructure sectors as a single, target-rich environment—one cyber battlespace,” said Brad Medairy, executive vice president and leader of Booz Allen’s National Cyber business. “In this threat landscape, this investment enables us to outpace adversaries and protect U.S. strategic advantage by enhancing weapon systems readiness. Shift5 will be a key enabler of our continued delivery of superior tradecraft for cyber-physical resilience and mission readiness.”
Created by officers who stood up U.S. Army Cyber Command, Shift5 defends commercial transportation systems and military platforms against operational failures and operational technology (OT) cybersecurity risks. The Shift5 platform enables rapid decision making for cybersecurity, maintenance, and compliance through complete data access and observability of OT, enabling organizations to improve their cybersecurity posture, reduce and avoid critical failures, and increase operational efficiencies. The company’s technology captures and analyzes real-time serial data, revealing critical operational and cybersecurity insights that enable organizations to move from data to decisions quickly and confidently.
“Since our inception, Shift5 has been laser focused on bolstering readiness and resilience for the Department of Defense (DOD), commercial aerospace, and rail,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO and co-founder at Shift5. “Our partnership with Booz Allen will create new ways for our defense, aviation, and rail customers to analyze and action the onboard data from fleets that they’ve historically lacked access to, reducing decision latency and enabling them to stay ahead of critical cybersecurity and operational risks. Doing this allows operators to modernize legacy systems, build next-gen fleets, and improve readiness and availability of critical OT systems.”
Booz Allen’s $100 million corporate venture capital arm furthers Booz Allen’s commitment to invest in strategic dual-use, commercial technologies that will provide federal clients with disruptive technology for critical missions. Previous Booz Allen Ventures investments include Credo AI, Hidden Level, Latent AI, Synthetaic, and Reveal Technology.
“Shift5 is a key enabler of the cyber-physical resilience and readiness of DOD mission systems, highly recognized commercial aviation companies, and critical rail infrastructure,” said Travis Bales, managing director at Booz Allen Ventures. “If critical infrastructure such as these are not fully functional, then national security, public safety, and economic security could be at risk. The work Booz Allen and Shift5 are doing together will unlock value for our clients as we work shoulder to shoulder with them to detect attacks and maintain resilience.”
Read more about Booz Allen Ventures and the firm’s National Cyber business.