Department of the Air Force Awards $8.6M to Istari Digital for Industry Øne

ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of the Air Force (DAF) has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital to establish Industry Øne, an initiative designed to break down digital engineering barriers and accelerate digital transformation across the Defense Industrial Base (DIB).

Defense programs rely on thousands of suppliers operating incompatible tools behind separate firewalls. Today, collaboration requires manually copying and sharing data - surrendering control and introducing risk. Industry Øne separates control from connection. Under Industry Øne, Istari will address persistent challenges facing defense acquisition and sustainment, including fragmented IT environments, incompatible software tools, and stringent security requirements that limit collaboration and slow capability development.

"Data stays locally controlled, yet globally connectable," said Will Roper, Istari CEO and former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. "That's the infrastructure the defense industry has been missing: the experience of Git across guarded firewalls."

Proven Results. Industry Øne builds on prior successful efforts. Flyer Øne, a partnership between the Air Force Research Lab and Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, which is trailblazing digital certification for the X-56A X-plane. Model Øne broke down barriers for cross-domain collaboration. Industry Øne now breaks down both at industrial scale, across multiple contractors simultaneously.

How it works. Istari's platform enables secure, policy-enforced access to engineering data without ever centralizing, copying, or storing it outside the owner's control. Each organization maintains its own firewall and data sovereignty, while models interact through controlled, auditable interfaces. This vendor-neutral, interoperable "Internet of Models" allows engineers across government and industry to verify designs, run automated tests, and reuse validated results in real time. By treating data as a place to compute rather than a file to move, the infrastructure supports Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), automated verification, and trusted cross-organizational collaboration at industrial scale.

What it delivers. Industry Øne represents a fundamental shift from manual, document-driven processes to live, continuously verifiable engineering systems. It enables secure, real-time collaboration across organizational and security boundaries without centralizing data, bringing CI/CD to defense acquisition. "Every barrier we've removed has made the next one easier," Roper said. "Industry Øne is where we scale a level digital playing field across the Defense Industrial Base."

About Istari Digital Istari builds infrastructure for no-fail industries, decentralized, zero-trust environments where models, data, and AI work together across organizations without being centralized or copied. All engineering data becomes live, AI-native, and independently auditable. Learn more at istaridigital.com.

Contact: Jenette Morell| [email protected]

SOURCE Istari Digital, Inc.