Athenium Assesses Infrastructure Risk for U.S. Air Force

Press Releases

Oct 01, 2024

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Athenium LLC, a provider of actionable intelligence to support U.S. Military combat readiness, has delivered condition and damageability assessments for over 2 million linear miles of roads and runways in South Dakota, Montana and select locations overseas.

“Commercial R&D is moving at an undeniably fast rate, but we’ve successfully leveraged the AFWERX Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) program to partner with small businesses and bring new technologies into the hands of our warfighters,” said Loretta Vega, 28th Mission Support Group Deputy for Installation Support. “We have collaborated with business partners to accelerate innovation through the execution of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, leading to TACFIs and direct commercialization. These efforts yield solutions for the DoD as well as the civilian sector.”

Based in Dover, NH, Athenium deploys patented meteorological and computer-vision technologies to identify surface conditions and degradation risk of critical infrastructure. For its latest project, Athenium utilized artificial intelligence to assess exposures of both civilian and military-use paved surfaces, said Jordan Foley, President of Athenium’s Climate Intelligence business.

“To deliver for the Air Force,” Foley said, “we extracted insights from 10,000 image tiles, 100,000 aircraft records and also from Athenium’s proprietary atmospheric databases.”

A meteorologist, Foley added that Athenium created the database over the past dozen years for the U.S. Defense-Intelligence Community, archiving more than seven decades of cleansed, normalized and rationalized weather and climate records globally. The archive covers all the earth’s land masses, ocean surfaces and both poles, drawing from more than 200 sources that report weather and soil conditions.

In addition to aiding combat readiness, the results from Athenium’s AI collaboration with Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota and Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana will assist those installations’ engineers in inspecting and maintaining paved surfaces.

“Our team has delivered far greater insights than previously available for assessing damage and distresses to roads and runways – not only in the U.S. but around the world,” Foley said.

The Air Force sponsored the program using funds allocated by Congress for innovative research and development by small businesses, according to Glenn Ojeda, Athenium’s Managing Director of Federal Programs. He thanked the Air Force Research Laboratory and its innovation arm, AFWERX, for the opportunity and noted that the roads-and-runways initiative builds upon solutions that Athenium originally created for inspecting building conditions and damageability of more than 80,000 structures located on U.S. Military installations in the U.S and abroad.

“Our AI tools rapidly analyzed billions of records related to severe climate conditions at every building, road and runway we have examined through aerial imagery,” added Ojeda. Learn more about Athenium’s infrastructure intelligence here.

Athenium analyzed imagery captured by fixed-wing aircraft, drones and satellites during the projects and now is prepared to deploy the solutions for commercial clients. “We can work with a diverse set of industries that need more insights as to property conditions, values and the potential for costly damages in the future,” Foley said. “These decision makers include real estate investors and mortgage originators.”

Athenium LLC is a portfolio company of In-Q-Tel, the private venture firm serving the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the broader intelligence community. Athenium’s climate-intelligence tools and other solutions serve the U.S. Air Force, Homeland Security and one-third of the largest property & casualty insurers in the U.S.

Contact: sales@athenium.com