CBP Looking to Innovative Startups to Help Revolutionize Travel and Border Management Technologies
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is an agency with a vast mission that spans safeguarding America’s borders to facilitating legitimate international trade and travel. A mission of this size and responsibility requires tremendous resources.
You are probably most familiar with our CBP officers who say “welcome home” or “welcome to the United States” to nearly 1 million travelers a day. If you’ve been welcomed home by a CBP officer, then you have seen one of our greatest challenges first hand — making the travel experience as painless as possible for lawful travelers while identifying those who might pose a threat to the Nation. Innovative programs like Global Entry (our flagship Trusted Traveler Program), Automated Passport Control (the kiosks millions of travelers use at airports) and Mobile Passport Control (the first CBP authorized app for processing) have proven to be beneficial in improving wait times and the travel experience without compromising our security mission. While these programs have made a positive impact on the travel experience, we can’t rely solely on them. Travel and tourism has increased 26 percent at airports in the last five years and is expected to increase at an annual rate of 4 percent. This growth is great for the U.S. and the U.S. economy, but also means CBP must continue to innovate our current processes to ensure a positive traveler experience with minimal wait.
While our CBP officers secure 328 ports of entry, our U.S. Border Patrol and Air and Marine Operations agents secure 5,525 miles of border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico and all of the coastlines in between. There, we face well-funded, adaptive adversaries like transnational criminal organizations. Assaults on our Border Patrol agents are up 200 percent in the past year, demonstrating the dangerous job our uniformed work force faces every day. Our agency needs updated technology to help secure the border and to extend the senses of our agents so they are well positioned against our adversaries.
That’s why when I learned about the DHS Silicon Valley Innovation Program, I knew CBP needed to be the first DHS operational component to partner with the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to seek out new technologies and solutions to support our front line operations. Last year CBP, working closely with S&T, held engagement events in Silicon Valley and our team traveled to other innovation hubs like Austin, Boston, and Seattle to engage directly with the tech community. I personally met with startups, venture capital firms, and others who are growing the economy and changing the world. Together, we identified four areas with both commercial investment and DHS mission need, and announced funding opportunities around them. These areas included: small unmanned aerial systems, remote passenger processing, technology to support our open source big data project, and canine wearables for health monitoring and training optimization.
These funding opportunities are not like your traditional government programs. Thanks to the vision and leadership of our partners at S&T, DHS has developed a funding process that meets the pace and needs of startups. We can have a proposal funded and working for us in as little as 120 days from the day the application is submitted. We have a streamlined application process and use oral pitches as opposed to lengthy written proposals.
We know we can get great technology from the startup community. Our goal, in turn, is to provide startup companies with growth opportunities. We can offer non-dilutive funding, the ability to use government test facilities, and opportunities to pilot new technologies in real world operational scenarios. We want to be a reference customer and introduce you to other government partners who can help open up new opportunities. Finally, CBP and S&T have built an internal team that is dedicated to moving at the speed of startups and helping companies be successful in working with the government.
In December 2016, we announced our first partners under this program: Factom, Tamr, Goleta Star, Echodyne, and Shield AI. We are calling these companies our “Charter Class” members and we’re counting on them to help us build this program to be as high impact as possible both for CBP and the startup community. We’re looking forward to adding more members to our Charter Class in the coming months.
We have a challenging mission and need cutting edge technology to succeed. If you’re a startup company, or a venture capitalist or tech accelerator with a portfolio of startup companies, we hope you’ll consider working with us at CBP.
I encourage you to learn more about the DHS Silicon Valley Innovation Programs.
