Tech-Savvy Spies Step Out of the Shadows and Into the Boardroom

Brian Carbaugh spent years living and traveling abroad in a variety of alias personas as a CIA officer. Now he’s fronting investor meetings and raising capital as CEO of Andesite, a Virginia-based data analytics startup, one of several recently retired spies taking their field experience from the CIA to the C-suite.

It’s a fortuitous time for these founders. President Donald Trump is trying to swell the national defense budget to a staggering $1.5 trillion next year, a roughly 50% spending hike that would be a boon for artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The war with Iran only strengthens their footing as the sophistication of Iran’s cyber and electronic warfare capabilities reinforces the need for quickly deploying new tech.

Trump’s dissatisfaction with the cumbersome bureaucracies and slow delivery times at established defense companies opens the door to shift more of that funding to startups. And Carbaugh and other former spies, who used cutting-edge tech in the field, may be best positioned to capitalize on a market for security-focused tech firms that, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, is expected to reach $338 billion by 2033.

This ex-spy cohort includes former CIA counterterrorism officer Aaron Brown, who founded Lumbra, an emerging technology firm focused on developing advanced artificial intelligence architecture, as well as Ryan Joyce, an Arabic-speaking former CIA operations officer who founded GenLogs Corp., which tracks trucks for supply chain security. They’ve all come to market in the past year or so.Former CIA officer Brian Carbaugh, co-founder of the data analytics startup Andesite joined to discuss on Balance of Power. These officers-turned-founders are calculated risk takers and problem solvers, with “exquisite domain experience,” said Juliane Gallina, who until last December was the deputy director of the CIA’s digital innovation directorate.

“They’re really well equipped to go into industry and really wrestle very challenging technology problems to the ground,” added Gallina, who is now with Lavrock Ventures, an Arlington-headquartered venture capital firm. Creating Tech They Wished the CIA Had

For these founders, those problems were directly related to their experiences during operations while at the agency.

Carbaugh was on the ground in Afghanistan in October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks and ahead of the official US-led invasion of the country.

“We were chasing disconnected leads to al-Qaeda, the intelligence would lead us in different directions all over Afghanistan, from village to village, from province to province,” he recalled in his first public comments regarding his role in the CIA’s Jawbreaker team hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. The information would come in fragments and “often without context from a variety of sources, the technology wasn’t fast enough or coalesced in a way that combined these threads into more meaningful actionable information,” he said.

Andesite’s platform, he says, “uses AI to race at machine speed to sift each haystack for needles, when it finds them, it immediately surfaces them in the form of insight, truth and context, to the analyst.”

Brown, meanwhile, faced similar challenges while serving as deputy branch chief running counter terrorism operations in the CIA’s Pakistan-Afghanistan department and working on the years-long hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“During my career, I was regularly confronted with massive volumes of data, and I knew with certainty that buried within it were clues to terrorist networks, emerging leaders, and active plots,” Brown said. “We always knew we were missing something.” He says he never planned to become Lumbra’s CEO but it quickly became clear to him that he needed to do more than make the technology his sole focus.

“I had to be the one drawing the map, setting the strategy, and growing the culture to bring it all into existence,” he said.

CIA Skills That Work in the Boardroom That’s not to say there haven’t been cultural differences.

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