Integration is a dirty word in defense. The consultancy model that solved it for decades no longer works when you're dealing with hundreds of systems from dozens of vendors across land, sea, and airspace, all needing to work together within milliseconds.In this episode of High Bit, Brett Gibson talks with Zane Mountcastle, cofounder and CEO of Picogrid, about how they built the hardware and software infrastructure layer that makes hundreds of defense systems work together.Zane gets into what it actually looks like to deploy in the field, from detecting a quadcopter 50 feet off the ground, operating in GPS-denied environments with decades-old hardware and adversaries trying to trick your sensors.Speed became their biggest differentiator. Their average integration time is measured in hours, and what used to take six to twelve months gets done over a weekend.He also explains why trust is the biggest moat in defense, and how AI is now core to how they build, including training a model on every system they've ever connected so a first pass integration happens in seconds.Chapters:

"Integration is a dirty word"

What Picogrid builds

How Zane ended up working with the Pentagon

The Last Supper: how defense consolidated

Why hundreds of new defense vendors made integration worse

Why the consultancy model no longer works

Why speed is their biggest differentiator

Each system has a language

Four types of location data to find and track a drone

Why Picogrid will never build a drone or sensor

The military loves to buy widgets

Trust is the biggest moat in defense

Calibrating in the field: the camera that finds the sun

First team in, last team out

How AI is now part of everything they build