Striveworks wins $70M deal

Striveworks said on April 15 it won a $70 million U.S. government agreement to expand its Chariot Core artificial intelligence software across defense agencies. (prnewswire.com) The Austin company said the deal runs for two years and gives up to 950,000 eligible defense personnel enterprise access to its software. Striveworks said the award expands work beyond existing deployments with the Army, Navy, and combatant commands including European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, and Central Command. (prnewswire.com) A separate Army award notice from January 15 listed Striveworks for a $70 million firm-fixed-price contract for Chariot software platform licenses, with an estimated completion date of January 14, 2028. That notice named Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, as the contracting activity and said bids were solicited on the web with one received. (envzone.com) Chariot Core is the layer that helps military users deploy, manage, and monitor artificial intelligence models after they are built. Striveworks says its platform is already used across land, sea, air, and space programs and is designed to move models into operations in hours instead of months. (striveworks.com; prnewswire.com) The Pentagon has spent the past three years pushing agencies to buy and run software more like a shared enterprise service instead of a one-off pilot. The Department of Defense software modernization plan for fiscal years 2025 to 2026 says the goal is faster delivery, stronger resilience, and wider use of enterprise buying and secure software pipelines. (dodcio.defense.gov; media.defense.gov) The Department of Defense made the same shift in its November 2, 2023 data and artificial intelligence adoption strategy, which called for scaling advanced capabilities across the enterprise and tied artificial intelligence to faster decision-making. A 2024 responsible artificial intelligence pathway said deployment also has to include governance, testing, and monitoring, not just model development. (media.defense.gov; media.defense.gov) Striveworks had already been building that defense footprint before this week’s announcement. Its website lists a January 8, 2026 Army selection for artificial intelligence test and evaluation work and a July 23, 2025 Army expansion tied to force protection on the southern border. (striveworks.com) The company has also shown up in Army innovation programs focused on testing and evaluation for artificial intelligence. In the Army’s xTech Scalable AI 2 competition, Striveworks was listed as a winner for “Valor,” a platform- and model-agnostic evaluation store for artificial intelligence operations pipelines. (xtech.army.mil) The open question is whether this award is the same contract previously recorded through an Army vehicle or a broader umbrella now being described as a defense-wide rollout. What is clear from the public records and Striveworks’ statement is that Chariot is moving from smaller mission deployments toward a much larger pool of Pentagon users. (envzone.com; prnewswire.com)