Business News from the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority

Jan 16, 2024

Fairfax County Economic Development Authority May 19 Talk of Tysons

Nearly 200 job seekers attended the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority's most recent Veterans, Transitioning Service Members and Military Spouses Career Fair held on May 10, 2023, at the National Museum of the United States Army in Ft. Belvoir; and on May 11, 2023, on a virtual basis. The event was co-hosted with Virginia Chamber of Commerce's Hire Vets Now Foundation, and held in partnership with Fort Belvoir, the Virginia Department of Veteran Services, and the Virginia Employment Commission.

"We are honored to provide support for transitioning service members and veterans to find civilian jobs, as well as assisting military spouses with their career objectives," said Victor Hoskins, President and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. "This benefits not only those who have served our country, but the many companies in Northern Virginia that are seeking to hire top talent."

During the two-day event, candidates had the opportunity to network with dozens of hiring organizations from rising start-ups to government agencies to Fortune 500 corporations. Top national employers, including GDIT, Leidos, Peraton, CACI and BAE, among my others, that were actively hiring for 10,000+ positions across a variety of sectors, including government, IT, finance, renewable energy, and healthcare.

Click here to read more.

The Fairfax Founders Fund (FFF), a grant and technical assistance program providing funds to early-stage Fairfax County-based startups, began accepting applications on April 10. The deadline for applications is May 22. FFF will provide up to $50,000 in capital to help start-ups develop their business and prepare for later-stage investment. It is designed for early-stage, high-growth trajectory companies seeking investment to develop. The goal of the Founders Fund includes expanding competitive technology clusters in Fairfax County and growing innovation-based businesses and jobs.

Fairfax County is conducting a broad marketing campaign with a focus on encouraging diverse and disadvantaged groups to apply including women, people of color, people with disabilities, and veterans who are traditionally underrepresented in tech product start-ups. Through Founders Fund the county hopes to foster economic mobility among founders of all backgrounds.

More information and applications can be found on the Fairfax County website at fairfaxcounty.gov, search Founders Fund.

The call for nominations for the 2023 Environmental Excellence Awards is now open! If you know of an individual, business, organization or county employee who deserves recognition for their accomplishments in the past year, consider submitting a nomination. The awards celebrate those who advance or support the county's environmental goals and policies, those who dedicate personal time or expertise beyond their normal fiscal or civic responsibilities, and those who demonstrate leadership as a role model for others. To submit a nomination by the June 1, 2023, deadline, please use the online submission form.

With a median tech wage of $122,889, tech employees in the Greater Washington region earn the second-highest median wages of any locality in the nation, according to a new deep dive into tech salaries by tech trade association CompTIA, reported AMERICANINNO. Washington State was at the lead with $129,995 and California followed Greater Washington, with a median wage of $119,568. And while not examined in the article, the cost of living is more affordable in Greater Washington than in Washington State or California. Visit https://workinnorthernvirginia.com/live/cost-of-living/ to compare the locations.

Reston-based SpiderOak, a firm that specializes in cybersecurity for space systems, announced new strategic investors, SpaceNews reported. The new investors are Accenture Ventures, Raytheon Technologies’ RTX Ventures, and Stellar Ventures, the companies announced May 18, although they did not disclose the value of the agreements. The strategic investments by these firms are separate from the $16.4 million Series C funding round that SpiderOak announced in January. "This investment will accelerate SpiderOak's deployment of zero-trust, end-to-end data security solutions for commercial and government customers operating in space," SpiderOak's CEO Dave Pearah said in a statement. The company, founded in 2007, developed a cybersecurity system called OrbitSecure used to protect satellites and ground infrastructure. About half of SpiderOak's business is from government contracts.

Virginia Tech, together with partners from Fairfax-based George Mason University, was awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop networking infrastructure for satellite constellations. Through the agency's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI) program, researchers will develop distributed, mobile space and terrestrial networking infrastructure for multi-constellation coexistence, The Virginian Review reported. "The NSF grant will support open-source cyber-infrastructure development and enable research on the creation of a new space-based networking technology that will connect networks from the surface of the Earth to the moon," said Jonathan Black, a professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech. "The goal is to open up these networks to all, uniting separate, independent constellations and encourage broad adoption of this technology."

General Dynamics Information Technology unveiled a technology strategy to advance investments in the areas of zero trust, multi-cloud management, 5G, mission artificial intelligence and machine learning, software factory and automation for IT operations, GovConWire reported. GDIT said it is leveraging those six digital accelerator areas through its government contracts, including a software development contract with an intelligence agency and an identity, credential and access management contract in support of the Defense Information Systems Agency's zero trust objectives. "We are at a critical pivot point in a rapidly changing global and technology landscape," said Amy Gilliland, president of GDIT.

Falls Church area-based General Dynamics Information Technology completed its migration to the cloud by closing its final data center at the end of 2022 and has pushed the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy by working with several vendors to meet the company's back-office requirements, CIO reported. "We’ve gone through our digital transformation already and migrated all of our application workloads into either an IaaS or SaaS environment," said James Hannah, a senior vice president and global chief information officer of GDIT. GovConWire has more.

With its latest portfolio investment, Booz Allen Ventures has cemented a key priority for the larger government IT brand — artificial intelligence technology, and its potential value in federal and defense contracting, according to DCINNO. The venture arm of Tysons-based Booz Allen Hamilton has made an undisclosed investment, its fourth, in Credo AI, a San Francisco startup whose software platform essentially helps puts up guardrails around AI algorithms in hopes of increasing their accountability and removing some of the ethical risks around their use. John Larson, a Booz Allen Hamilton executive vice president who heads up its AI practice, has seen past waves around big data, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Web 3, but he says AI is different. "It's probably the most transformative technology since electricity," Larson said. "It's changing the nature of work. And I think those are the things that we’re gonna have to really think through and assess and evaluate."

Herndon-based Hawkeye 360, which provides radio frequency detection from space, will be launching an additional nine satellites this year to expand its services, according to National Defense in a feature article about the company. Brandon Lickey, product marketing manager at Hawkeye 360, said there will be three launches with clusters of three satellites each, with the first scheduled in early April. Hawkeye 360's main customers are the defense and intelligence communities, which have found value in the company's ability to spot the energy produced by everything from radars to push-to-talk radios, he said in an interview with the magazine. Click here to read more.

Israel-based Cellebrite, which has a Tysons office, and Colorado-based The Exodus Road, an international nonprofit organization focused on disrupting human trafficking, announced that their partnership for providing digital intelligence technology to ensure the National Bureau of Investigations (NBI) Anti-Human Trafficking Division in the Philippines has the capacity to accelerate justice in cases of exploitation, according to Yahoo Finance. Cellebrite and The Exodus Road are long-standing partners in the fight against human trafficking. Over the years, Cellebrite has equipped The Exodus Road teams and their law enforcement partners with digital intelligence technology that has led to many successful survivor rescues, perpetrator arrests and convictions.

Falls Church-area based Northrop Grumman fulfilled an order from the government of Poland for key components of the Integrated Battle Command System, according to ExecutiveBiz. The delivery of the Integrated Fire Control Network relays marks the first completed foreign military sale of IBCS, according to the company. "IBCS provides Polish air defenders with the ability to make faster, better-informed decisions to deter, disrupt and defeat threats across all domains," said Rebecca Torzone, vice president and general manager of combat systems and mission readiness business at Northrop.

Tysons-based B&A, a systems integrator and software developer for the federal government, announced that it has acquired Bethesda-based IT and management consulting firm iDoxSolutions. B&A said the combined entities will provide advanced IT offerings to governments, including to iDox's customers that include the GSA, DoD, DOJ and other federal agencies. The move by B&A is its first acquisition since receiving backing last year from Battle Investment Group. "Together, we will deliver a broader array of capabilities enabling us to solve a wider set of mission-critical problems for our customers while also providing new opportunities for our talented team members to continue serving those customers," said Mike Brant, the president of iDox. Potomac Tech Wire carried the release.

Tysons-based NextNav, a developer of GPS technology, said it has raised $50 million through private notes offering. The notes are due in Dec. 2026 to a group of lenders that includes Whitebox Advisors, Susquehanna International Group and Clutterbuck Capital Management. Ganesh Pattabiraman, NextNav's co-founder and CEO, said the deal "provides significant runway to actualize our strategic priorities, and efficiently maximize the full value of our asset-rich platform for shareholders and customers." Potomac Tech Wire carried the release.

In a move that will expand its AI capabilities, 10Pearls, a Tysons-based digital product and software engineering company, announced that it has acquired Oiga Technologies, a digital product development firm located in Colombia. Oiga specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and blockchain technologies. The move follows a string of international acquisitions by 10Pearls over the last year. "Our customers are constantly looking for tech-forward solutions, and we believe that 10Pearls’ global engineering scale will provide the technological depth and ability to execute in an agile manner to meet their ever-evolving needs," said Michael Puscar, founder of Oiga Technologies. Potomac Tech Wire picked up the release.

The Richmond Police Department unveiled its new armored vehicle on Friday at its headquarters, Richmond Register reported. The Pit-Bull VX Special edition vehicle was manufactured by Chantilly-based Alpine Armoring, and was delivered to the department in March. "This is a piece of equipment capable of keeping our officers and innocent members of our community safe during an emergency response to a tragic and unfortunate event like the ones happening across our country," said Richmond Chief of Police Rodney Richardson.

The Fairfax County Economic Development Authority (FCEDA) promotes Fairfax County, Virginia, as a business and technology center. The FCEDA offers site location and business development assistance, and connections with county and state government agencies, to help companies locate and expand in Fairfax County.

Want to know more about the services of the FCEDA, or how economic development helps Fairfax County? Visit the FCEDA website or e-mail [email protected].

Fairfax County: "One of the great economic success stories of our time" — TIME