SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Kharros, the company building source-selection and contract-management T&E software for the U.S. government, today announced it has been accepted to the Naval Postgraduate School's Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) 26-4 event, at the NPS Field Laboratory at Camp Roberts, California.
JIFX is a quarterly, vendor-neutral field experimentation series hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School. It convenes technology developers, operational personnel, and government stakeholders in a collaborative, fail-friendly environment to advance early-stage capabilities against national security challenges.
At JIFX 26-4, Kharros will conduct an experiment to test whether a deterministic, government-run source-selection workflow can ingest the unstructured data of a live field event and still produce fast, reproducible, and defensible down-select rankings. Treating the systems present at the event as a live submission pool, Kharros will run them through its compliance-and-evaluation pipeline against pre-defined criteria, scoring observed field performance the way a contracting office scores written submissions. The company will measure down-select throughput against field-data volume, scoring reproducibility across repeated runs, and how field-data noise affects evaluator confidence compared with clean document intake.
The experiment targets a growing problem in defense acquisition. Modern contract vehicles such as Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) and Other Transaction Authorities (OTAs) allow government offices to solicit at the speed operators need, but the evaluation behind those solicitations has not kept pace. A single solicitation can draw hundreds of submissions, and manual review by a small team becomes the bottleneck that slows every award and leaves it exposed to protest.
Kharros is built to close that gap. The contracting officer makes every decision, and the full record is preserved.
"Fast procurement is only good procurement if the evaluation holds up," said Ruggles Bohannon, Co-Founder of Kharros. "The government has chosen speed, and the evaluation layer has to match it. JIFX is one of the few truly neutral environments in the country where we can put our workflow against the hardest input there is and find out exactly where it holds and where it breaks. That is what an experiment is for."
Learn more about Kharros’ AI-assisted source selection and proposal evaluation capabilities.
About JIFX
JIFX (Joint Interagency Field Experimentation) is a quarterly Department of War program managed by the Naval Postgraduate School that acts as a rapid, low-bureaucracy testbed for emerging military technology. Hosted at California military bases, it bypasses traditional federal contracting delays by letting private tech companies and academics deploy prototypes (advanced drones, mesh networks, and AI) directly into an operational environment. This unique environment allows commercial engineers, academic researchers, and active-duty warfighters to collaboratively stress-test hardware, gather instant performance feedback, and accelerate innovations toward formal defense acquisition pathways.
About Kharros
Kharros builds AI infrastructure for federal acquisition. Its platform helps government teams structure source selection, evaluate commercial capabilities against defined requirements, preserve the evidence behind acquisition decisions, and carry rigorous evaluation from solicitation through contract performance.
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