SIMBA Chain Awarded $1.5 Million Contract With The United States Air Force

The popular cloud-based BaaS platform revealed that it secured a $1.5 million two-year contract with the United States Air Force, which will be used to fund the Phase Two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project. This commitment is an essential continuance of the first SBIR Phase One project and now features SIMBA Chain as a partner as well as one of the biggest aerospace corporations in the world.

With the help of SIMBA the U.S. Department of Defense is trying to tackle well-known demands, such as developing cyber-related capabilities to enhance logistics and supply chain management solutions, introducing blockchain into the Air Force’s training and research programs, and designing specific use cases based on aerospace parts.

Jeffrey Slayton, director, Special Programs, Strategy and Policy, U.S. Air Force, commented:

“The Air Force supply chain is incredibly complex, with thousands of participants across the globe and many parts designed, manufactured, inspected, and transported each year. With the advent of additive manufacturing, which allows us to print parts on-demand anywhere in the world, including on battlefields, supply chain complexity and the need for data integrity have grown exponentially. Emerging technologies like SIMBA Chain’s blockchain platform have the potential to achieve the reliable exchange of information over an unreliable network where not all participants can be trusted, and in so doing, continue to advance the technological supremacy of America’s air, space and cyber forces.”

The SIMBA Chain project launched in 2017 after the people behind it were appointed to create a secure messaging and transactions platform for the U.S. military and won a grant award by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing and ITAMCO. Recently, SIMBA Chain also won the First Source Bank’s 2019 Commercialization Award, and the TechPoint 2019 Mira Award.

CEO Joel Neidig noted that SIMBA Chain’s smart contract-as-a-service platform is very appropriate for the U.S. Air Force and other branches of the Department of Defense and believes that the Phase Two project will confirm this:

“The capabilities offered by SIMBA Chain’s blockchain platform should enhance the Air Force’s Supply Chain Management Wing’s ability to provide an uninterrupted and validated pedigree of supply chain support and mitigate the risks posed by counterfeiting and data breaches.”

Neidig pointed out that, “Additionally, with minimal training, our solution can be rapidly deployed across the Air Force and other military branches. Unlike traditional blockchain that requires deep technical knowledge, SIMBA Chain allows developers with little or no programming experience to build and deploy distributed applications (dapps) rapidly and cost-efficiently on cloud servers or on military infrastructures. This is a significant advantage to the military where dynamic situations are common.”

SIMBA Chain will collaborate with aerospace OEMs, which will provide three typical aircraft components for case study analysis, and assist with the development of supply chain events and data modeling methodologies. They will also validate the solution with business case analysis and strategy for larger-scale deployment.