Representatives from the companies in the third cohort of the Cummings Research Park DefenseTech Accelerator gather for their initial meeting on April 9, 2026 in Huntsville.
Photo by Claire Aiello, Huntsville/Madison County Chamber
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (April 10, 2026) – We are excited to announce the third cohort of the CRP DefenseTech Accelerator, an effort between the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber, Cummings Research Park, and Treble One.
Twenty-two companies applied to be in this cohort, and after an extensive selection process, five were chosen to participate: Aerial AI Solutions (AAIS), Argonath, Green Squirrel Research, Ingenix Technologies, and Numberz.ai.
Treble One operates the accelerator and has hired Michael Johannessen as program director of the Alabama Accelerators, managing day-to-day activities of this Huntsville cohort.
“Some of the most important innovations in national security are coming from small businesses, but navigating the path to adoption within the defense and aerospace sectors is complex,” said Johannessen. “The CRP DefenseTech Accelerator offers an excellent opportunity to connect small businesses with the Chamber, Treble One, and Innovate Alabama to provide strategic direction through partnerships. It leverages the expertise of Treble One advisors with decades of Air Force experience to bridge gaps, align technologies with real mission needs, and ultimately deliver capabilities to the warfighter while fostering significant economic growth in Huntsville and across Alabama.”
Company leaders met on Thursday, April 9 at Signals Museum for the initial kick-off. This cohort will run 12 weeks and culminate on June 23 with a pitch finale. The CRP DefenseTech Accelerator is designed to help grow and scale each company’s products in the defense and commercial markets, with the ultimate purpose of growing our community’s defense industrial base with the next generation of small businesses focused on technology products.
“We’re excited to welcome our third cohort of the successful CRP DefenseTech Accelerator. With four of the five companies hailing from our metro area, we know the potential impact to right here at home,” said Erin Koshut, Executive Director of Cummings Research Park. “The Chamber and CRP look forward to supporting these companies and what they bring to the warfighter.”
CRP and the Chamber want to thank Innovate Alabama and the three companies who are helping to support this new cohort: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, Regions Bank, and Synovus. This cohort will be housed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville’s (UAH) Invention to Innovation Center (I²C) for the duration of the program. The Accelerator utilizes the Innovate Alabama Tax Credit program, which is a statewide initiative where Alabama companies and individuals with significant tax liability can allocate 50% of their taxes to stay local. This includes the Alabama income tax, state insurance premium tax, state public utility license tax, and state portion of the financial institution excise tax.
Here is more information about the participating companies:
Argonath
Argonath is building software that enables continuous authorization for Department of Defense systems by integrating directly into modern development pipelines. Today, software must undergo a 12–18 month approval process before deployment, slowing the pace of innovation across mission-critical systems. Argonath transforms this into a continuous, real-time process by automatically generating what’s needed for approval as software evolves. The company is engaging with Air Force and Army programs and has received support from senior DoD leadership. Over time, Argonath aims to become a core layer in how secure, mission-ready software is deployed.
Aerial AI Solutions (AAIS)
Aerial AI Solutions is a software development company and AI R&D lab pioneering a modular AI visual analytics platform designed to turn anything the human eye can see into actionable intelligence, massively reducing identification/inspection times and boosting accuracy. To solve the problem of human inefficiency and complex data bottlenecks, the system autonomously ingests sensor-agnostic inputs via APIs and spawns specialized expert agents in real-time to perform deep niche analysis. Within the defense and aerospace sectors, this technology is critical for pushing rapid, highly secure visual analytics from the enterprise cloud directly to the tactical edge. By leveraging recursive learning loops, AAIS transitions these disruptive technologies to the warfighter, delivering rigorously tested, secure outcomes for mission-critical challenges in multi-modal sensor fusion and missile defense.
Green Squirrel Research
Green Squirrel Research’s technology, Delve, is a multi-modal AI document intelligence platform that transforms unstructured technical data like PDFs, reports, tables, figures, and images into structured, queryable knowledge. It addresses a widespread challenge across defense, aerospace, and research organizations: critical insights are buried in disconnected legacy documents, making them difficult to access, compare, and apply without significant manual effort. Unlike traditional AI tools that primarily summarize text, Delve converts documents into structured, semantically linked data that can be analyzed and acted on. Built for secure and air-gapped environments, it runs locally on analyst laptops or scales to high-performance computing resources, enabling mission-critical use across a range of operational settings.
Ingenix Technologies, Inc.
Ingenix Technologies’ Device Inspection System (DIS) is an AI-enabled hardware assurance platform that uses side-channel analysis and machine learning to verify the authenticity and integrity of electronic systems. It addresses a critical gap in current cybersecurity practices by detecting counterfeit, tampered, or maliciously modified hardware that traditional software-based methods cannot identify. DIS enables rapid, non-invasive inspection at key points across the supply chain and prior to deployment. This capability is highly relevant to defense and aerospace systems, where compromised hardware can introduce mission risk, degrade system performance, or enable adversarial access in contested environments.
Numberz.ai
Across U.S. Air Force installations, critical ESOH and hazardous materials data is fragmented across disconnected systems, limiting real-time risk visibility. This directly impacts mission readiness through unacted hazards, over-ordering, expirations, and inefficient disposal. The DoW does not lack data — it lacks the ability to convert it into actionable intelligence at speed. Numberz is building an AI-native platform that fuses siloed data and delivers prioritized, explainable actions to operators and commanders. The result is reduced risk, lower cost, and measurableimprovements in mission readiness.
For more information, contact:
Erin Koshut
Cummings Research Park
[email protected]