How Did We Get Here? We Tested Everywhere.
Testing at 6G Testing Center in Oulu, Finland, Aug. 2026
From communications-denied laboratories to bridges, uncrewed platforms, multinational exercises, advanced networks, and space, real-world testing is accelerating Kinnami AmiShare® toward operational readiness.
Word got around at “Station Austin”* that Kinnami was doing something with NATO. That led to an invitation to speak at Fed Supernova on a panel about how emerging-technology companies “get on contract” with the Alliance.
The timing was apt. The July 2026 Ankara Summit Declaration announced more than $50 billion in new procurements and committed NATO Allies to expanding manufacturing capacity, accelerating innovation, and reducing defense trade barriers. That followed an increase of more than $139 billion in investments in core defense requirements by European Allies and Canada in 2025. The original panel title nearly conjured the sound of cash registers ringing.
I agreed to bring the emerging-technology company’s perspective. Kinnami has been named a NATO DIANA Innovator, and our work with NATO DIANA and Allied partners has continued beyond our formal Phase II participation.
Emerging technology does not “get on contract” the way a commodity supplier might hope. The path is different: find a market for the product, identify the ideal customer—and who controls the budget—articulate a compelling reason to buy, secure a paid pilot, and scale.
It sounds simple. It is not easy. Add a shifting market, global events, acquisition processes, and competing solutions, and the path becomes a fractal.
But back to the point. We were invited. I went. I spoke. And one of the points I made was this:
A promising technology such as Kinnami AmiShare must be developed, tested, and validated across the kinds of environments in which it is expected to operate—not just modeled and simulated in a laboratory.
AmiShare must be tested where communications are denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited; where devices move among networks; where computing resources are distributed; and where data must still reach the right person or system in time to be useful.
For a small technology company, gaining access to those environments can be as difficult as developing the technology itself. NATO DIANA has played a significant role in opening those proving grounds to Kinnami.
Customers Made Us Do It
Customers and partners have shaped AmiShare by testing it against real operational problems—not laboratory assumptions.
Kinnami's development journey has therefore been shaped by customers and partners willing to test AmiShare against real operational problems. Early U.S. Air Force and university work helped us established the technical foundation and take it from concept to test. Critical-infrastructure deployments moved AmiShare beyond the laboratory. NATO DIANA then accelerated that progression by opening access to multinational exercises, test centres, platforms, integration partners, and operationally relevant environments across land, sea, air, and cyber domains.
Each step has done more than validate the product. It has challenged assumptions, revealed improvements, and helped turn a resilient-data concept into a more deployable mission capability
First, Assume Nothing Works
Early U.S. Air Force and university testing established AmiShare’s foundation for protecting and sharing mission data when communications and GPS could not be assumed.
Through Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer work with West Virginia University and the U.S. Air Force's 563rd Rescue Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Kinnami evaluated resilient data sharing for personnel recovery and combat search and rescue. West Virginia University positioning algorithms operated on drones while AmiShare protected and distributed the resulting data in a communications-denied test environment—it was a large indoor lab.
Next that work was expanded to include ATAK devices, and other nodes into a distributed data environment. It helped establish that essential mission data could remain protected and locally available when a node was disconnected, then move and synchronize when a communications path became available again. That ability is fundamental in rescue operations, where teams may be dispersed, conditions change quickly, and the information needed to locate and recover personnel cannot depend on continuous connectivity.
The project was foundational for AmiShare. It proved core behaviors in a mission context and gave Kinnami direct insight into how software must perform on heterogeneous, mobile, resource-constrained systems.
How Did we Get Here? We Crossed a Bridge
Bridge Test site in rural Nebraska - 2025
Critical-infrastructure deployments moved AmiShare beyond controlled testing and into remote, distributed edge environments.
The next stage brought a different mission, but the same underlying data problem.
Working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Engineer Research and Development Center (USACE ERDC) and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kinnami moved from laboratory testing to live critical-infrastructure environments, remote bridges. AmiShare secured and managed data collected from on-bridge and off-bridge sensors and made that information available to university scientists for AI-analytics. This was actually our first brush with success with NATO – my colleague, James Burke, Director of Business development at Kinnami, presented the solution at a NATO Innovation in Resiliency Challenge. And we were one of three winners in 2022 for the Smart Resilient Data Fabric for Real-Time Data Collection, Monitoring and Analysis of Critical Infrastructure.
At rural bridge demonstrations in Nebraska in 2024 and 2025, the project showed how data generated far from a conventional data center could be protected at its source, retained through communications interruptions, and delivered to the computing environment where it could be analyzed. The bridge itself became a distributed edge environment: sensors produced data, local systems stored and moved it, and remote researchers needed dependable access to it.
Kinnami and its partners are now finalizing project testing by demonstrating resilience across multiple AI analytics environments. Cloud infrastructure, a remote Raspberry Pi, and a backup Raspberry Pi provide alternative analysis locations. AmiShare supports sustained analysis as availability changes and reconciles data across the environments when connections return.
This work reinforced an important product lesson: resilience is not simply keeping a network link active. It is ensuring that protected data remains usable, that analysis can continue in another location, and that distributed copies can be synchronized after disruption.
This Must Be the Place
NATO DIANA expanded Kinnami’s proving ground through multinational exercises, operational platforms, integration partners, and specialized test centres.
Early customer programs proved the core technology. NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic created opportunities to test it with greater scale, diversity, and operational realism.
For many startups, access to operational platforms, military communications systems, field exercises, multinational users, and qualified integration partners is limited. NATO DIANA's value to Kinnami has extended well beyond accelerator funding. Through its network of exercises and test centres, DIANA has provided a progression of environments in which AmiShare could be installed, integrated, stressed, observed, and improved.
During NATO Innovation Continuum 2025, Kinnami completed planned and ad hoc integration experiments and collected operational data from mobile platforms. A Kinnami node operated aboard a rigid-hulled inflatable boat in Portugal and on a robotic ground platform in Türkiye. Kinnami also demonstrated an integration with fellow DIANA Innovator Goldilock, showing how complementary technologies could work together during Alliance experimentation.
These were not polished demonstrations conducted under fixed laboratory conditions. They involved battery-powered equipment, moving platforms, partially disconnected networks, on-site installation, and the practical constraints of field integration. The experience challenged assumptions and led to product ideas intended to make AmiShare easier to install and operate in the field.
You May Ask Yourself: Which Network Am I On?
Testing in Finland demonstrated resilient data management across changing Wi-Fi, 5G, satellite, and tactical-radio connections.
Finland's entry into NATO added a country with deep expertise in wireless communications, cybersecurity, Arctic operations, and dual-use technology development. Finland became NATO's 31st member on April 4, 2023. The University of Oulu's 6G Test Centre subsequently joined the NATO DIANA test-centre network, giving innovators access to private 4G and 5G networks, developing 6G capabilities, satellite connectivity, tactical communications, and sophisticated testing infrastructure.
In August 2026, Kinnami tested a four-node AmiShare mesh at the 6G Test Centre in Oulu. Nodes were distributed across an uncrewed aerial vehicle, an uncrewed ground vehicle, and static ground systems. GPS and camera data moved across Wi-Fi, Nokia 5G, Starlink satellite, and Bittium tactical-radio networks.
6G Testing Center in Oulu, Finland, August 2026
The tests examined the behavior that matters when communications are dynamic: switching among networks, multi-hop data movement, policy-defined prioritization, loss of connectivity, continued local collection while disconnected, and automatic synchronization when connectivity returned.
The point was not to show that one network could remain available indefinitely. The point was to demonstrate that the data layer that AmiShare supports could continue protecting and managing information as the available communications paths changed. Advanced networks create powerful new possibilities, but no single transport eliminates obstruction, interference, congestion, coverage gaps, equipment failure, or deliberate disruption. Mission continuity requires the data itself to be resilient across those changes.
The Oulu testing also illustrates how NATO's newer members and test-centre ecosystem can strengthen the Alliance's innovation capacity. Facilities that would be difficult for a small company to assemble independently become shared proving grounds where technology can mature faster and with better evidence.
The Testing Never Stops
Independent evaluation and upcoming NATO exercises continue to challenge AmiShare in increasingly operational conditions.
NATO DIANA is one part of a broader validation journey. Kinnami has also completed independent testing with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. That work provided third-party technical feedback and identified additional opportunities to harden AmiShare for degraded and contested environments.
The next NATO DIANA-supported step is DiBaX in Latvia, where Kinnami expects to participate in operational testing during September and October. The exercise will build on lessons from Portugal, Türkiye, and Finland while placing AmiShare alongside military users, equipment, and communications networks in another operationally representative setting.
Additional opportunities are emerging in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. These include potential multi-domain testing involving uncrewed aerial, ground, and maritime vehicles. Across these environments, the platforms and networks change, but the technical question remains consistent: can mission data remain protected, available, and synchronized when the communications environment cannot be trusted to remain stable?
And Then We Left the Planet
Two U.S. Space Force STTR awards are extending lessons from terrestrial and airborne testing into distributed space operations.
The same principles now extend beyond terrestrial and airborne systems into space.
Kinnami recently received two U.S. Space Force Phase I STTR awards with Embry-Riddle Aeron Aeronautical University and West Virginia University as research partners. Kinnami and Embry-Riddle were selected through the SpaceWERX Adaptive and Intelligent Space Challenge, which focuses on advancing on-orbit computing, sensing, and orchestration capabilities.
These awards represent a new domain, but not a departure from Kinnami's development path. The lessons learned from drones, tactical devices, bridge sensors, remote computing nodes, robotic platforms, boats, satellites, cellular networks, and tactical radios all inform how AmiShare can serve distributed space operations.
Same as it Ever Was? Never.
Operational readiness is built through repeated testing, evidence, learning, and improvement—not through a single successful demonstration.
No single test proves that a technology is ready for every mission. Readiness is built through repeated exposure to different platforms, networks, users, integration requirements, and failure conditions.
For Kinnami, the progression has been cumulative. Air Force and West Virginia University work established AmiShare's ability to support mission data in communications- and GPS-degraded environments. ERDC and UNO moved the technology into live critical infrastructure and distributed AI analytics. NATO DIANA expanded access to multinational exercises, diverse uncrewed systems, advanced test facilities, and integration partners. Independent testing added external technical scrutiny. New Space Force awards now carry those lessons into distributed orbital operations.
This is why access to real-world experimentation matters so much for small defense innovators. It shortens the distance between a promising technical idea and a capability that can be installed, integrated, trusted, and used. It reveals the practical problems that specifications alone cannot anticipate. And it gives developers the evidence needed to improve the product before the mission depends on it.
Kinnami's testing journey continues, but the objective remains unchanged: ensure data gets where it needs to be, when it needs to be there - across land, sea, air, space, and cyber environments, even when connectivity cannot be guaranteed.
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