SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Kharros, an independent small business building source-selection and contract-management 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, taking place 10 to 14 August 2026 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. Acceptance is competitive and based on the strength of a proposed experiment rather than a demonstration.
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 platform runs the full contract lifecycle on one configurable system, from vendor submission and deterministic compliance intake through technical evaluation, down-select, award, and period of performance. The office sets every check, threshold, and criterion. Deterministic compliance checks produce identical, auditable results on identical inputs, and capability evaluation follows with optional, advisory AI assistance that cites every flagged claim to its source. 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, Cofounder 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."
Kharros plans to participate using software only, bringing no sensors, transmitters, or collection hardware to the event.
About Kharros
Kharros is an independent small business building productized source-selection and contract-management software for the U.S. government. The platform helps offices move from solicitation to award at the speed of modern contracting, with compliance and capability evaluation built in, every score reproducible, and every decision defensible and on the record. Kharros grew out of work across U.S. government innovation and acquisition programs.
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