Excited to announce this initiative from the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition & Sustainment)’s Global Markets & Investments (GMI): a NEW competitive Cornerstone Initiative Request to stand up one or more prototypes of a Trusted Capital Marketplace!
The Marketplace will be a public-private partnership for vetted companies and third-party capital providers to support small- and medium-sized companies in manufacturing and producing “emerging defense and commercial technologies.”
That was Linda Lourie — Associate General Counsel (Acq. & Logistics) — on Linkedin. Here is the link to the FedBizOpps webpage announcing the RFP for non-profits to help manage the process for vetting companies into the defense industry. A bit more:
This effort will produce a sub-sector of Cornerstone Sector 17, “Trusted Capital”. This CIR [Cornerstone Initiative Request] establishes a Trusted Capital Marketplace Program under the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program. Functional management of the Trusted Capital Marketplace will be the responsibility of a non-profit Trusted Capital Marketplace Manager (TCMM). The TCMM will develop and employ a set of prototype processes and tools to fully support effective: a. construction and management of the Trusted Capital Marketplace, b. attainment of the listed technical objectives, c. management of ongoing TCM operations, and d. vetting of prospective Trusted Capital Partners and industrial companies, and subsequent monitoring of their trustworthiness over time.
I believe there will most likely be multiple awardees to avoid a single point of failure for vetting these companies. Hopefully this proves to lower the barriers to entry. Here is a Federal News Network announcement on the initiative. A slice:
DoD expects to roll out the entire program sometime in July and already has about 50 companies in mind that are trusted enough to join the marketplace…
“A lot of these companies are small innovative companies that don’t have the resources, sophistication or contacts to reach sources of capital,” Lord said. “What we are trying to do is enable that, so they don’t have to go through a lot of time and expense with legal firms to find out who is out there.”
Leave a Reply