St. Louis is vying to be the next big defense tech hub with a new initiative meant to attract startups and investors eager to build up the geospatial industry. But while advocates see the Gateway City as an obvious choice, there’s work to do to convince others.
“A lot is manufactured for the Department of Defense here in St. Louis. Boeing—obviously used to be McDonnell Douglas—is here, and famous for the F-15, F/A-18, and all of those famous aircraft. There is an intersection of all of these things that come together for St. Louis that really is obvious to the people that live here, that maybe is not as obvious to the people outside,” said Mark Munsell, the former chief AI officer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who now leads the GeoFutures initiative.
GeoFutures is part of the Greater St. Louis, Inc. not-for-profit but investor supported effort to increase economic development in St. Louis by attracting new businesses, increasing the workforce, and research and development for geospatial AI in national security as well as other sectors like biotechnology and agricultural technology. The project recently released a three-year strategic roadmap and implementation plan designed to “improve the geospatial ecosystem.”
Why geospatial? Munsell said it’s “special because it does apply to all businesses, all domains, if you’re trying to measure, discern something in space and time, geospace, geospatial technology helps you do that.”
The city is already home to offices of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which opened a new collaborative workspace this month, and major defense and geospatial players, including Maxar, Leonardo, and General Dynamics Information Technology. And while Boeing is moving Super Hornet upgrade work out of the area, the company plans to spend $1.8 billion to build a digital engineering and aviation facility in 2030.
NGA’s new multibillion-dollar facility has been under construction for years, and that helped grow defense tech expertise; GDIT, for one, doubled its local workforce to about 200 in the past five years.
The agency has data “analysts everywhere: the DC metro area, and then deployed at [combatant commands]. But when you look at the ratio of analyst expertise, they’re really, really heavily concentrated in the St. Louis area,” said Will Clapperton, vice president for GDIT’s geospatial services and solutions. “Having modern capabilities in the local St. Louis area, in particular in the new headquarters building, is very mission-important to them… And as a product of that, our workforce has grown there. The amount of technicians and subject-matter experts to help get them into that new facility from a design and deployment perspective, and then migrate all their workforce into it, has been a huge focus over the last couple of years. It’s a big part of why we, individually, as a company, have grown in that area.”
GDIT has expanded its real estate holdings in the area to accommodate growing geospatial intelligence demands.
“Even though NGA is making a pretty significant investment in a new headquarters facility, they’ve still got a need for industry to provide other, I’ll say, real estate capability to house and conduct those missions,” Clapperton said.
In recent years, he noted, GDIT’s office space in St. Louis has ballooned from housing just a few people to having space at a large office park called the Cortex with classified and unclassified components and expanded space. GDIT also has office space for personnel and SCIFs at the Globe Building, Clapperton said.
The city has also attracted newer companies—which it hopes to do more of, according to GeoFutures’ strategic roadmap, which recommends creating a dedicated organization to serve as a touchstone for geospatial startups, existing defense contractors, investors, and jobseekers.
One of those companies is Scale AI, which is opening a new data center in the former headquarters of the Post-Dispatch newspaper near NGA’s campus. The company recently landed a $99 million Army contract for research and development.
“With our government customers, they’re all interested in building AI solutions. And the fuel for those AI solutions is the high-quality, AI-ready data that Scale produces, and training of that data happens at Scale’s St. Louis AI center,” A.J. Segal, who leads that center, told Defense One. “You can think of what we’re building here is kind of that new arsenal for the 21st century. So instead of steel, we’re forging this arsenal on the human capital and high-fidelity data that we have at our AI center, which are the two essential ingredients for AI-driven national security.”
Moving into the Post building will help bring San Francisco-based Scale AI closer to the geospatial community overall, potentially boosting partnerships with institutions like the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the geospatial-focused T-REX innovation center.
“The thing that makes St. Louis a great opportunity to create that defense-tech hub is the fact that they’ve already begun this with their geospatial hub. There are companies that are already here, that are already working in defense, and there’s companies such as Scale that really are sitting on both sides of the fence,” Segal said. “We’re focused on cracking the code of that complex complicated geospatial data, and we’ve identified this talent pool here in Missouri, we provide them with the training, economic opportunities for people that probably would have never envisioned a career in tech or an emerging tech company.”
There’s been a push in recent years to broaden the Pentagon’s reach beyond the Beltway, specifically through the Defense Innovation Unit, which established regional offices to seek relationships outside Washington, D.C.
But there’s also been interest from Congress to do more, including a bill championed by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., to “establish a network of regional hubs to foster innovation, collaboration, and rapid development of defense-related technologies.”
The Senate version of the 2026 defense authorization bill also includes a provision that would mandate a program “to develop, operate, and maintain incubator programs for secure facilities and networks at select universities” and “regional innovation hubs that strengthen the national security innovation base.” The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act mandates a geospatial-specific pilot program to bolster a skilled workforce near areas where NGA operates.
St. Louis isn’t the only city competing to be a defense tech hub. The burgeoning Detroit-launched Reindustrialize summit was focused on reinvigorating defense and manufacturing in the Midwest.
“That Midwest spirit is special. I was born here in St. Louis…We have people that want to live here in St. Louis. They want to work here in St. Louis, and they have a special connection to the region, and they want to develop it,” Munsell said. “We have successful businessmen. We have billionaires that have been born here, grown up here, started businesses here, and in many cases, couldn’t get venture capital, right? [They] had great ideas, great technology, graduated from the best universities here in St. Louis…but had to leave the area and take their ideas with them somewhere else, either Silicon Valley or Boston or wherever.”
Now, Munsell hopes to help make St. Louis the right place for “entrepreneurs that see new opportunity.”
“If you have talented people…and when they get together and compare notes, there’s this great potential to come up with something that goes way beyond the linear growth of federal contracts that come to the area,” he said.
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