Veterans in Advanced Energy Profile: Max Adams

Max adams, a 2021-2022 Veterans advanced energy fellow. click the button below to learn more about the fellowship.

Max Adams, a 2021-2022 Veterans Advanced Energy Fellow, started his career integrating experimental technologies with the US Army’s special operations in Latin America. He is now using that experience as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Parasanti, providing machine learning data solutions for the Department of Defense and renewable energy industry. As told to Jordan Bekenstein

Why did you join the military and what was your role?

I have an educational background in international affairs — while studying in college I became interested in the intersection of global politics and national security. I read Major Jim Gant’s “One Tribe at a Time” when I was in college, and it had a big impact on my view of global affairs. Gant was a Green Beret officer who was interested in building alliances through tribes in Afghanistan. I enlisted straight out of college through the 18 XRAY program to go straight into the special forces qualifications course. I was always interested in participating in special operations, probably from watching too many movies or TV.

I ended up going into the special ops component of civil affairs, 98th Civil Affairs Battalion, working primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean. I was based out of Fort Bragg, but the headquarters for Special Operations Command South is in Miami, so we would post up there and do episodic engagements in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Civil Affairs, you’re almost acting as a diplomat for the military, you go out and conduct civil reconnaissance, meet with host nation locals and partner forces, get a gauge on what local activities are. I spent a lot of time in Guyana, Colombia, and Trinidad & Tobago, conducting operations out of there. The crux of my job was integrating new technologies and experimental technologies into soft operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

How did the military influence your career trajectory into energy?

In a roundabout way. When I got out of the military, I drove to Austin and met up with my two co-founders, James and Josh. Our company Parasanti was birthed in the Department of Defense (DoD) and federal space, and we’ve now expanded our business into the advanced energy space with the support of Halliburton Labs as a portfolio company of theirs. We offer an integrated suite of hardware and software that enables sensor fusion, data orchestration, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) enablement at the extreme edge. Essentially, we are able to containerize AI/ML algorithms, deploy them, and compute them without access to bandwidth.

As you can imagine, the military applications were pretty enormous. You give someone a hardware device preloaded with certain algorithms on it that can connect to all the different sensors a soldier might have — from video processing and cameras, vehicle maintenance sensors, biometric sensors, any data-emitting device — you can bring all that data in, fuse it, and then deliver analytics on it regardless of bandwidth. There’s an enormous crossover between those core capabilities and into advanced energy. We’re taking a lot of the same baseline capabilities and deploying them for renewable energy solutions as well as some advanced analytic solutions for oil and gas. That said, we primarily focus on doing a lot of proof of concepts to better understand the value chain and better understand our customer and buyer personas. 

We have a few people on our team, including myself, who have a strong interest in how you would secure the energy supply chain across the battlefield. At the end of the day, how you secure that energy source is going to affect your ability to project power regionally and at a micro level. If you think of a forward operating base or a tactical operations center, they’re usually rife with generators everywhere, which require massive amounts of fuel. If someone breaks that supply line, you’re out of luck. There’s a lot of interest from DoD in renewable energy, microgrids, and other ways to provide energy resiliency on the battlefield. That was where my initial interests lay, and now we’re able to pivot and offer these solutions in the advanced energy space, and that’s pretty phenomenal.

What are you most excited about in advanced energy developments, and what are you most concerned about?

I’m interested in what’s happening with microgrids right now. That’s really fascinating, trying to converge energy from the local level to the national level, it’s something that’s exciting. I’m constantly thinking in a DoD mindset, and being able to deploy these microgrids in tactical operations centers is incredibly compelling. As far as concerning, I’m not entirely sure, but I know building grid resiliency and grid hardening right now in the US is extremely interesting.

Why is energy important to US national security?

Energy is a critical part of what we call joint all-domain command and control. It’s extremely important that we have a consistent, reliable flow of energy, whether that’s oil and gas or renewable, to make sure we have resiliency across that supply chain and are able to power the sensors and systems that provide the common data fabric for our warfighters to operate. That’s where renewable energy really steps up to the plate here and provides alternative solutions in which we’re not as beholden to foreign sources of energy. If there’s an authoritarian government that has full control over the energy supply chain, it’s easier for them to impose non-democratic values and norms, whatever culture or society they have. If you change that energy supply chain and decentralize it, it changes social contracts and constructs within that nation and allows it to become more pluralistic or democratic. 

Do you have advice you would like to share with other veterans?

Volunteer. After spending years in uniform and you get out, you spend so much time focused on reinventing yourself, reinventing your career, it can be a good grounding rod to volunteer to do something community-based or outside of yourself. 

What are you most looking forward to about the Veterans Advanced Energy Fellowship?

It’s twofold. First, I’m really excited to meet the rest of the fellows and get a more holistic understanding of energy. My knowledge is definitely nascent here, and that’s part of why I’m in the fellowship now, to surround myself with people who are smarter than me on energy and grow into the space as my company continues to grow and provide more solutions. Second, I work in the federal space and speak to decisionmakers who conceptualize the future of military operations for our country. Being able to connect the ideas coming out of this fellowship with decisionmakers in the DoD space is something I’m really looking forward to.