Tech Outlook with Mark DelGrande, Verus Research

Verus Research is an Albuquerque startup that works closely with some of the high-technology fields that Albuquerque is known for, like electromagnetics, high power microwaves, and nuclear testing and evaluation.

The company has seen significant growth in the last decade and has four locations throughout Albuquerque.

Our guest on the week’s episode of the Tech Outlook podcast was Mark DelGrande, the chief technology officer at Verus Research. DelGrande had a career in the Air Force that included assignments at Los Alamos National Laboratory and earning his doctorate in nuclear engineering.

Here’s a preview of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Tech Outlook podcasts are released on Monday afternoon and are available on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes and SoundCloud.

Verus Research was founded in 2014. Can you give us a little bit of background and history about the company?

It’s interesting, because most startups are coming to the table and going to the bank asking for money to get a startup going with their gizmo, their gadget, we’re going to sell a million of whatever. That’s not what we were about. We were not creating anything, but providing services to create solutions for our customers. We founded our company with the technology and experience we had at the time was, which was primarily with electromagnetics, high-powered microwaves, and nuclear testing and evaluation. So we like to think of ourselves as sort of a development team that starts with low technical readiness level, that’s the term that they use in the in the military ... and then create those up to prototypes that can be actually used in a relevant environment.

You talked about providing solutions to your customers. Who are your customers?

“The vast majority of the work we do is with the Department of Defense. So our focus has been on test and evaluation efforts with the Army, Navy, Air Force, all three services, on looking at capabilities that we can create to help them do more tests on these emerging technologies. We also have a large effort here in Albuquerque with the (Air Force Research Laboratory’s) Space Vehicles Directorate. So we created basically a platform for any technology to come to the table and start creating it sort of in an incubator. So we leverage the really smart people — we have mechanical, electrical physicists, and computer engineers — and work with them to address different needs that we see across the country. With space vehicles, we had an individual who came in who understood artificial intelligence and autonomy applications and machine learning for space applications. We leveraged that from one person five years ago, and now it’s a team of 15 folks that work with space vehicles on up to now $30 million efforts.

So 10 years ago a handful of people create Verus Research. What has been the trajectory of the company?

It started with a couple of folks. So I mentioned Tony Byers, the founding CEO. He got together with Hank Andrews, who’s our CFO (chief financial officer), Hank was a former bass commander here at AFRL at Kirtland Air Force Base. And those two folks, they recognized that they could answer a problem or address problems for the customer, and also have the other part that a lot of startups don’t maybe think about, especially on the science side. You got to make payroll, you got to have (human resources, and you got to have health benefits and all those sorts of things. Hank was the backbone of the company, providing and ensuring that we met payroll and that we had benefits for the employees on day one, and that we had the processes in place for servicing Department of Defense contracts that could be audited and all the things that the DoD requires. So today, we’re over 150 folks.

Why is the work that Verus Research does so important?

A majority of the efforts that we do right now are centered on ensuring that the systems that come to the warfighter operate the way they should so that threats that might appear to our service members in uniform can be addressed. I think of the idea of swarms of drones. So today directed energy is sort of making a resurgence in addressing the drone attack problem that you’ve seen on the news in recent battles and conflicts around the world. The application of directed energy is a key way to not just be shooting bullets up in the air and hoping you can hit when hundreds of drones come at you.

And how is that technology used to help a warfighter?

Drones can be used in two classic ways. The smaller ones just look. I have eyes on target that can be used for penetrating the lines without using people and actually see where warfighters are. You don’t want those guys around. They can be swarming around a base like flies, just looking and recording and listening. The other ones are more nefarious, they’re the ones that are that have explosives tied to them. And usually you just take those and you launch them into a fuel depot or some sort of vehicle that has a individual (target). And when there’s lots of them, they’re very hard to defend against.

Can you describe the relationship between Verus Rearch and AFRL?

We have some major contracts with both the Directed Energy Directorate here and at Kirtland Air Force Base and the Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base. For the Directed Energy Directorate, it’s about high power microwave systems. It’s developing new and novel technologies, how can you make these systems that I just talked about smaller, more efficient, more capable? One of the systems that rolled out here in the last few years was a system called THOR. We were a major contributor to the development of that. It’s a counter (unmanned aerial system). And a lot of our team right now supports testing that goes on with emerging technologies that the Air Force is looking at, to learn more about how this electromagnetic energy affects targets and how we can use that in a more intelligent way to protect against it.

On the space vehicles side, our primary focus has been leveraging and understanding ways to insert trust and autonomy for satellite systems. So with the emerging number of satellites, space is going to get cluttered with satellites here pretty soon. It makes it really hard for operators on the ground to address everything that comes up that a satellite sees, and sometimes satellite decisions have to be made on a satellite system on what it should do. For example, my sensors are looking at the sun and I need to move out of the way. How much trust do you have in giving the satellite control to make those decisions? And so insertion of autonomy is happening across the board. We’re supporting space vehicles in doing some of that, and also assessing how trusted those systems should be.