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Key people at Anno.Ai.
Founded in 2018 by Steven Witt and Ashley Antonides in Reston, Virginia, Anno.Ai provides a machine learning and training data platform that processes complex sensor data, imagery, and full-motion video for automated analysis. The company specializes in developing testing infrastructure for unmanned aerial, underwater, and ground vehicles to support the defense, national security, intelligence community, and commercial markets. Operating as an AWS Partner and NVIDIA Inception program member, the enterprise secures government contracts, including a $799,937 United States Air Force Small Business Innovation Research award in 2022. With approximately 25 employees, the early-stage startup currently generates under $5 million in annual revenue and has raised less than $5 million in total funding. In February 2026, the organization expanded its operations by planning new testing infrastructure for autonomous vehicles around Lake Superior in northern Minnesota.
Key people at Anno.Ai.
# Anno.Ai: High-Level Overview
Anno.Ai is a defense technology startup that provides machine learning data curation and autonomous systems testing infrastructure to government and commercial customers.[1][2] Founded in 2018-2019 by former U.S. military and Intelligence Community officers, the company addresses a critical gap in how organizations prepare data for machine learning models and validate autonomous platforms.[1][2] The core product—described as "The GitHub for machine learning data"—enables rapid annotation of sensitive datasets (video, imagery, audio) for building and iterating ML models at scale.[1] Beyond data curation, Anno.Ai has expanded into providing testing infrastructure for unmanned vehicles across defense and commercial ecosystems, including unmanned aerial systems (UAS), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).[7]
The company operates at the intersection of national security and AI innovation, serving warfighters, defense agencies, and commercial partners who need to overcome operational challenges while maintaining tactical advantages.[2][5] With offices in Reston, Virginia and Minnetonka, Minnesota, Anno.Ai has secured significant government backing, including a $2.6 million Phase II SBIR award from the U.S. Air Force in 2022.[1]
Anno.Ai was co-founded by Steven Witt and a team of former military and intelligence professionals who recognized a fundamental problem: the difficulty of preparing vast quantities of sensitive data for machine learning applications.[2][4] The founders' lived experience in defense operations gave them deep insight into how data bottlenecks slow mission-critical AI development.[1]
The company emerged from this mission-focused perspective rather than a purely commercial one. The founding team understood that warfighters and analysts needed tools to rapidly annotate classified and sensitive datasets without compromising security—a need that existing commercial ML platforms couldn't address.[1] This insight led to the development of a cloud-based and on-premises data annotation platform capable of handling classified, regulation-controlled, and proprietary information.[1] Early traction came through SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) awards from the Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force, beginning with Phase I funding in 2019 and advancing to Phase II by 2022.[1]
Anno.Ai operates within two converging trends: the democratization of machine learning and the acceleration of autonomous systems development in defense. As organizations across government and commercial sectors struggle to operationalize AI, the bottleneck has shifted from model architecture to data quality and preparation—precisely where Anno.Ai intervenes.[1]
The timing is critical. The U.S. Department of Defense has prioritized AI modernization and autonomous capabilities as strategic imperatives, creating sustained demand for tools that compress development timelines.[1] Simultaneously, the commercial autonomous vehicle and robotics sectors face similar data annotation challenges, expanding Anno.Ai's addressable market beyond pure defense.[7]
The company also reflects a broader ecosystem shift: the rise of mission-driven defense tech startups founded by operators rather than pure technologists. This model—combining deep domain expertise with modern software practices—has become increasingly attractive to both government customers and venture investors focused on national security.[2]
Anno.Ai is well-positioned to capture significant value as defense modernization accelerates and autonomous systems move from development to deployment. The company's expansion from data curation into testing infrastructure suggests a strategy to become an end-to-end platform for autonomous system development—from training data preparation through validation and field deployment.
The key inflection point will be whether Anno.Ai can scale its government relationships into sustained, multi-year contracts while simultaneously building commercial traction in the autonomous vehicle and robotics sectors. The company's founder-operator background and security-first architecture are competitive moats, but execution at scale—particularly in managing the complexity of classified environments—will determine whether it becomes a category leader or remains a specialized niche player.
As autonomous systems transition from experimental to operational, the infrastructure and data tools that enable safe, rapid development will become as essential as the platforms themselves. Anno.Ai's early positioning in this space, combined with its mission credibility, suggests it could play an outsized role in shaping how the next generation of defense AI systems are built.
