Following the news in 2025 that Excel Technologies had announced its rebrand as AetherForge, aligning the company’s identity with its evolved mission: advancing cyber and organizational resilience through technical expertise, AI-enabled tools, and the integration of uniquely human insight, we caught up with this 2026 Elev8 GovCon honoree. AetherForge CEO, Deb Yamanaka, shares more about the rebrand, their holistic view of technology, and how the team walks the walk, not just in the broader conversation, but alongside their customers and partners.
Technology from a Holistic View
The focus of AetherForge, on people, process and technology, distinctly defined in its new mission – technical expertise, AI-enabled tools, and the integration of uniquely human insight – comes from a holistic view that is sometimes overlooked or forgotten. “When you look at why an organization exists, when you look at the mission of an organization, the one thing we have to remember is that technology does not exist in a vacuum. Humans are why technology exists, and our organizations are why we have technology. It is easy to forget, especially in cybersecurity, that it all starts and ends with the human, and organizations are fundamentally human.”
Yamanaka says overlooking the why often leaves organizations less secure and more brittle. “We need to understand both the ultimate boss – the American people – and why we want to secure a system; exactly what we are protecting.”
Knowing this insight needs to come long before a procurement is released, AetherForge has tasked members of its team to listen, to go to events and sessions and meetings, and to really hear what an agency’s pain points are, not by what they’ve been told they need, but by their actual challenges.
“We have to be a few steps ahead when it comes to rules and guidelines that may be coming or changing so we’re developing for the future, not for what exists at this moment in time.”
A Unique Tool in the Toolkit
While many are forging ahead developing AI with a ‘we’ll see what comes approach’, AetherForge is aware there are inherent risks not yet understood, so it employs sociologists on its cybersecurity teams to help predict and mitigate what may come. “We still don’t know everything AI is capable of. We’ve seen the models break the boundaries and in breaking those boundaries, our job is to figure out what are the new things and the new risks that are introduced.”
One of those may be complacency. “We have an entire generation of people coming out of high schools and colleges who are so well AI enabled that they may or may not have the solid individual critical thinking skills. When you introduce that human component into an organization that has a mission to deliver, you’re talking about possible life and death.”
Yamanaka says something that is often overlooked are the hackers who have the ability to break into the human mind and break the way we fundamentally think.
“There is a fine line we walk and that is enabling AI to do the things we most need it to, to free us from the more mundane tasks so we can be fully human with the desire to explore and experience and lead better lives, and letting it take away those critical thinking, analytic functions that are best driven by humans.”
The Separation of Engineering, Compliance and Validation – The Partner Lens
“We believe firmly in the separation of engineering from compliance and validation so we’ll work with companies that can, if a contract requires it, do the engineering while we focus on the compliance. We’ll work with companies who have great engineers and therefore we can firewall them off. We put the firewalls in place to make sure that we are not materially benefiting from the engineering piece of it.”
Noting that AI has enabled everyone to become a system coder, to the tune of potentially millions of applications in the federal space, there is a need to plan, to prepare, to be ready to mitigate.
“This is one of the places sociologists come into play – thinking organizationally within a structure that allows us to rapidly identify where these applications are coming in and how they’re being used. We also have to really get out of the mindset of protecting applications and really focus on protecting data at the data root. What is the data? Where is the data? Where is it managed? How is it housed? We have to have librarians.”
Part of the Bigger Conversation
Ethical choices – including that AI must not harm humans – must be at the basis for any development. “We must remember that technology exists for the purpose of advancing human understanding and human opportunity and human activity. It must not be used destructively. You can’t always ensure the code is being created in a way that honours the human side of it, but you can hire people who understand and respect that. You can organizationally say, we are this, this is our mission, we will not do these things.”
Sitting on standards panels that are thinking about the ethics of AI, leaning on sociologists who attend some of the bigger, better AI conferences where people are thinking about this and where people are sounding the alarm, AetherForge works to be part of those bigger conversations, to influence the evolution of new rules and guidelines.
“We should be working always to be able to identify how to help our clients, how to uphold and defend the Constitution and that means hiring internally with that in mind but also seeking partners who value the same.”
Walking the Walk
Avoiding the word consultant or advisor and the implication of telling someone what to do and how, Yamanaka says AetherForge provides independent analysis and recommendations, but then walks clients through the process and does the work with them. ‘We don’t just sit in a chair and do the same thing every day. Instead, we work with many systems and people and organizations within organizations, rowing side by side with them.”
The team also holds a high esteem for accountability, pioneering the use of specialized dashboards so the client can see exactly what is happening, where in the plan the work actually is with transparency.
Rebranding with Purpose
Yamanaka says the rebrand was really recognizing that it was time to step into the clothes that fit, “because for a long time, we’ve been wearing clothes that were too small and not really in our color scheme. Looking around the company there were all these amazing, fierce individuals, many of whom have joined us within the last 10 years. It didn’t take us long to understand who we are and wanted to present. It was time for us to step forward with our real strength, our real personality.”
Looking at the AetherForge website you see it – in the colors, in the AI-generated images of its team showing personality and strength and individuality.
“Beyond our uniqueness as people, as a company, we are known for being incredibly thorough, incredibly efficient, incredibly honest, incredibly accurate, incredibly strong. Our products and our CPARs represent that. If you want to do it right, if you want to do it thoughtfully, we’re the people you want on your team.”
