Incubated for DoD & Intelligence use cases, startup announces commercial availability of enterprise AI platform, delivering the fastest path to secure production AI
ARLINGTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / December 10, 2025 / Axonis, the federated AI infrastructure platform that enables enterprises to run AI directly on distributed, sensitive, and real-time production data, today emerged from stealth with a production-ready architecture that brings AI to any data, wherever it lives. The company also announced the appointment of Todd Barr as Chief Executive Officer. Barr, formerly of Red Hat, Chainlink, and GitLab, will lead Axonis as it commercializes its DoD-hardened architecture for the enterprise market. Barr joins technical founders David Bauer, PhD, and Chris Yonclas, distributed systems and AI/ML experts for the US Army, DARPA, and multiple US government cloud, intelligence, and digital transformation initiatives.
Axonis leadership: Todd Barr, CEO; Aimee D’Onofrio, COO; Chris Yonclas, Co-founder & CPO; David Bauer, PhD, Co-founder & CTO
The Axonis platform introduces a new architectural model that brings AI to the data, eliminating the need for data migration or duplication and delivering secure, immediate, and scalable AI for training, fine-tuning, and deploying models across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. Axonis complements and protects existing cloud and data lake investments by providing a parallel path that enables organizations to act on raw, real-time data immediately, without slowing down or rethinking their centralization strategy.
As Barr leads Axonis into its commercialization phase following two years of incubation within a US government military contractor (T2S Solutions, part of the Madison Dearborn portfolio), the company is now fully independent and positioned to address one of the biggest barriers in AI adoption: operationalizing AI on data that is too fragmented, regulated, or mission-critical to move.
“Enterprises are quickly realizing that the real barrier to AI isn’t modeling; it’s getting AI models into production,” said Matt Norton, Partner and Head of Technology & Government at Madison Dearborn. “Axonis solves this problem at the architectural level, and Todd has the go-to-market experience to bring that solution to market at scale.”
Data Centralization: Where AI Works in Theory, Not Practice
Enterprises continue to struggle with taking models from proof of concept to production because some of their most valuable data-transactions, customer data, logs, sensor streams, images, and other real-time signals-cannot be moved to a centralized environment. Regulatory constraints, cost, latency, and operational risk make traditional data centralization strategies slow, expensive, and often impossible to fully achieve. As a result, AI adoption stalls at the exact moment organizations attempt to deploy models into mission-critical workflows.
Axonis Architecture: Bring AI to the Data
Axonis solves this production bottleneck with a federated AI architecture that executes models directly where data is generated and governed. Instead of moving terabytes of sensitive data, Axonis moves lightweight models, enabling:
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Training, fine-tuning, and inference on live production data
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Streamlined ELT at runtime for both training and inference
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Real-time intelligence across distributed, centralized, and edge environments
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Secure execution without creating new data copies
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Model collaboration across organizations without sharing raw or sensitive data
This model-to-data approach dramatically reduces data movement, improves model freshness, and unlocks up to 12x faster time-to-AI value.
“After the ChatGPT-style quick wins, enterprises are realizing that they have an architecture problem standing in the way of true business transformation with AI,” said Barr. “Axonis delivers a secure, AI-ready architecture for data and AI compute that will underpin and unlock the business transformation possible by GenAI and agents, without having to run a big IT data centralization project to get there.”
Engineered for Defense, Built for Enterprise Scale
Axonis’ architecture originated inside T2S Solutions to support the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, where systems must operate under extreme constraints:
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Intelligence must be close to the data
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Data security is survival
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Connectivity is limited or intermittent
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Data is chaotic and everywhere
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Every action must be governed and auditable
These requirements shaped Axonis into a high-assurance platform that meets and exceeds the security, sovereignty, and operational demands of industries such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, critical infrastructure, and the public sector.
“We’ve spent the better part of six years engineering the AI architecture in Axonis that will support environments where failure isn’t an option,” said David Bauer, Chief Technology Officer and technical co-founder of Axonis. “Those same capabilities-distributed execution, zero-trust security, and model-to-data design-are exactly what enterprises now need to safely and reliably run AI in production.”
Built to Integrate, Designed to Collaborate
Axonis is a cloud-native enterprise solution that fits seamlessly into existing enterprise data and AI ecosystems, including Snowflake, Databricks, MinIO, Iceberg, Jupyter, and leading AI frameworks. The platform also unlocks a new model of cross-organization collaboration: teams can share intelligence without sharing or pooling data, allowing each party to benefit from federated learning while keeping sensitive information fully protected. Because Axonis applies security at the data level, even agentic AI systems and chatbots cannot access or act on information they are not authorized to see, bringing a new level of control and data protection to enterprise AI deployments.
About Axonis
Axonis brings AI to the data, wherever that data lives. Originally developed inside a US government solutions provider to the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, Axonis enables secure, real-time AI on production, operational, sovereign, and edge data without moving the data. Axonis accelerates time-to-AI value while providing zero-trust, data-level security, and enabling cross-organization AI collaboration without sharing data.
For more information, visit axonis.ai.
Press Contact
Kristin Canders
207-974-7744
kristin@grithaus.agency
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SOURCE: Axonis
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