Driving Mid-Tier Growth by Anticipating What’s Next

It can be easy to believe that you know a company, who they are and what they do, but it is always worth checking in to see what is new. OS AI sat down with Anirudh Kulkarni, CVP founder and CEO, to catch up on what’s happening with this award-winning healthcare and next-gen technology and consulting services firm. Beyond what we already knew about the company’s recent contract awards, including a $23B VHA IDIQ secured by its JV, and its third-place win in the NIH NCATS Bias Detection Tools for Clinical Decision Making Challenge, we learned about CVP’s newest technology accelerator, Franklin™, and discovered how this team is thriving as an innovative, mid-tier firm.

From Consultants to Innovators

Founded in 2003, CVP has been focused on the customer since the beginning. In its early days, the company worked alongside private sector clients in their efforts to build sustainable operations, drive organizational maturity, and strengthen customer relationships through customer service, digital outreach, and marketing.

In 2014, CVP decided to refocus, pivoting to support public sector healthcare and national security clients. “Our talent was motivated by tackling problems and making a real difference for the citizenry of this country,” said Kulkarni. “Healthcare is something we all need, and the security of the nation is important to everyone, so changing course to focus on those areas made sense. To this day, helping solve some of the biggest challenges of government is what drives us.”

When the firm entered the middle market several years ago, CVP invested in new technologies and capabilities, launching an R&D team with a customer-centric approach to innovation, called NextLabs. Designed to collaborate with teams in the field, NextLabs builds mission-enabling technology accelerators designed to solve real-world problems with a focus on flexibility, functionality, compliance, security, and scalability.

“It isn’t just about the technology—it’s thinking about problems in different ways,” shared Kulkarni. “AI is a good example of this. How can we build trustworthy solutions our government clients can rely on? How can we navigate and mitigate risk? What tools would help our clients deliver better, faster, more economical services to the American public? These are the types of problems we’re solving every day.”

With a history of being among the first to bring AWS cloud capabilities to government clients, CVP is adept at helping the federal government adopt industry-leading technologies that support agency priorities, transform operations, and enhance mission success.

New AI Insights and Capabilities

Over the years, CVP has developed several technology accelerators designed to enhance government operations and improve service delivery: Babington (an anomalous and adverse event detection platform), Era (a virtual reality training tool), Hopper (a DevSecOps life cycle automation platform), Nightingale (an advanced data insights platform for model hosting and development), and Franklin, launched in April 2024.

CVP Franklin is a suite of trustworthy generative AI solutions built to satisfy federal government demands for safe and reliable GenAI. It combines cutting-edge technologies into a modular platform that supports systems integrations and uses a patent-pending anti-hallucination solution to deliver reliable information to users.

As ChatGPT began spinning, showing people what was possible with GenAI, CVP saw the trend growing, start-ups launching, and players like Google getting into the game, but realized these applications were more focused on private sector where the risk tolerance may be higher.

“As industry partners, we need to identify the applications where AI can be an invaluable assist for government,” said Kulkarni. “Once we know where AI can make the biggest impact, we can build a safe, reliable solution that will work for our clients—one that gives federal leaders peace of mind when using new technologies to achieve better outcomes. Franklin is our solution.”

Meeting Government Standards

Thinking about government use-cases for GenAI applications, there were three key issues that stood out. Hallucinations could not be tolerated. Then there was the issue of authoritative data and how to protect knowledge and keep it reliable. Finally, security must meet rigorous controls and standards.

“Other GenAI tools ship data all over the world for model training,” explained Kulkarni. “We knew our federal CISOs would never tolerate data sharing or leakage, and that reliability and security would be top priorities, so we architected a solution that segregates the knowledge base from the LLM, uses patent-pending algorithms to enhance the accuracy of results, and meets the highest security standards. We had to adapt and adjust this rapidly changing technology to mitigate its inherent risks.”

The result so far has reduced hallucinations to almost nil, transparently controls costs so government can scale as needed, and deploys the solution and all data inside a client’s data center or secure cloud enclave. Kulkarni described how easy it is to integrate Franklin into existing tech stacks and infrastructures, saying “Because we’ve built in a robust security framework derived from GAO, NIST, and AI best practices, it isn’t difficult to take a customized application that’s ready for rollout and production and get a full ATO so Franklin can get to work.”

A Customer-Centric Approach to Innovation

Before CVP started building Franklin more than a year ago, its NextLabs team explored three questions: What are federal leaders’ peskiest problems—the recurring tasks or challenges that slow them down or distract them from their primary mission? Which of these problems, if solved, would make the biggest impact? And, what is the most efficient, effective, affordable solution for these problems?

It became clear that no one solution will suit every user need. The result? Franklin launched in April with a suite of four products to suit specific user demands:

• FranklinCHAT increases employee productivity and efficacy by automating routine tasks, facilitating collaboration, and providing actionable insights—saving employees ~2.1 hours daily
• FranklinEXPERT provides accurate answers to complex queries, reducing customer wait times by 98%, handling times by 75%, and agent-related costs by 93%—while improving QA scores
• FranklinANALYST reviews large volumes of non-standardized, complex documents 99.8% faster than humans, increasing accuracy and freeing up valuable time
• FranklinDEV streamlines the software development lifecycle without compromising accuracy, security, or data privacy—reducing the time required to create, test, and deploy code from weeks to mere minutes, saving 99.75% in developer-related costs

Kulkarni described the importance of putting trustworthy, industry-leading technology into the hands of the agencies and organizations that serve the public: “Franklin doesn’t replace people, it’s a tool that helps them do their jobs faster and more effectively—which is a win for the government and a win for its customers. Franklin is a safe, reliable solution that helps the government improve operations and deliver better services—better healthcare, better customer and employee service and experience, better research, better almost anything our federal leaders can imagine.”

Engaging with Industry

Having moved beyond a small business into the middle market, Anirudh often hears from small business owners looking to learn from CVP’s success.

“It is important to understand that what you have or are today is not necessarily going to get you where you want to go,” he shared. “You have to challenge your assumptions and establish a differentiator that will help you stand out. For CVP, that is our deep domain experts, our focus on data, and our digital innovation—all fueled by the expertise and dedication of our integrated teams.

“We still have the strong technologies and experts in data science and cybersecurity that we built our reputation on in the public sector, but we’ve rounded out our team with clinicians, clinical informaticists, and public health policy experts. We have people who are experienced in certain types of grants, specific disease categories, oncology, behavioral health, and trauma-informed care. We have customer experience experts, and organizational transformation specialists, and award-winning communications teams. We still work hard and stay focused on the customer, and now we’re able to deliver enhanced, holistic solutions to help our federal clients achieve what’s Next.”

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