WASHINGTON — Leonardo DRS is purchasing software company Raft in an all-cash transaction valued at $450 million, the company announced this week.
“Our customers increasingly require integrated hardware, software, data and autonomy to support mission outcomes. The acquisition of Raft will build on and accelerate the organic investment that DRS has made in that evolution,” John Baylouny, president and chief executive officer of Leonardo DRS, said in a press release Tuesday. “Raft adds proven software talent and open-architecture technology that complement our existing sensing and computing capabilities and strengthen our ability to deliver AI-enabled mission solutions at the speed our customers demand.”
Raft, founded in 2018, specializes in open architecture mission software, fusing various data streams to support multidomain operations and faster decision making for commanders, according to the company.
As Breaking Defense previously reported, the company has been heavily involved in the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control prototype effort in the Pacific with 25th Infantry Division and will play a major role as part of the Army’s common data baseline, awarded to Anduril in June.
Of note, Raft’s work in the Pacific spans beyond its support for the Army and its C2 efforts, also stretching to the Air Force and Pacific Air Forces powering command and control tools.
“Joining DRS is a natural next step for our team and our mission,” Shubhi Mishra, founder and chief executive officer of Raft, said in the release. “Our open-architecture platform was built to integrate across systems, not lock customers in, and pairing it with DRS’s sensing and computing franchises will accelerate our ability to deliver mission capability at a global scale.”
The news of the acquisition comes shortly after Baylouny told Breaking Defense in a recent interview that he’s looking to find companies to help fill certain technology gaps or enhance its solutions with more capabilities such as AI.
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“There’s a lot of different opportunities — and I’m not saying structural gaps — but how do we enhance, go to an adjacency? So technology gaps, customer gaps, like you talked about — can we get more Air Force [work]? It’s not an imperative, but could we open our solutions to those channels,” he said. “Or geographic gaps as well. Can I get to a different part of the world by bringing an acquisition to the table? And we’re active here, it’s just, it’s not our focus. Our focus is organic. But we are active, looking for inorganic as well.”