Aloha Spirit & Defense: Our Founder's Story
I said “No” to the Department of Defense first.
Then came the best decision of my career.
This first post shares my founder's story. Future posts on this blog will come from people across Kana Systems who have their own stories to tell, too.
In 2019, I was recruited by the Department of Defense to help modernize nuclear weapons technology at USSTRATCOM.
I turned them down.
I was already running a commercial technology company and was about to become president of the largest Rotary club in the state. Government contracting wasn't my world. I didn't think I was the right person for something involving classified data and a mission that serious.
The DoD didn't take no for an answer.
They invited me to Colorado Springs to understand the problem for myself. That's where I met Major Rob Slaughter and his team.
I remember asking them a simple question: Why me?
They told me the country needed entrepreneurs with a track record of innovation and a reputation for doing good. They were looking for companies that hadn’t worked in government contracting prior.
Once I understood the magnitude of the problems they were trying to solve, I said yes.
What I saw from those first military customers stayed with me.
Smart, capable people were spending weeks digging through reports and spreadsheets just to get to an answer they could trust. Before they could use their expertise to make a decision, they had to spend an enormous amount of time finding, reconciling and validating information.
We knew we could help.
That eventually led us to build Kana AI Engine, extending technology we had developed in my previous company.
The idea was simple: take work that consumed weeks of people's time and help them get to trusted, decision-ready information in minutes. Workflows that once took months could happen in days or even hours.
The goal was never to replace the expert. It was to remove the work that kept the expert from being an expert.
Give people their time back so they can do the things only they can do: apply judgment, understand context and make the decisions that actually matter.
Working on one of the country's most sensitive national security missions taught us something else very early. Our technology had to earn trust, not just produce answers.
Over time, we started hearing from customers that we were solving something much bigger than we initially understood.
Rear Admiral Fritzemeier told us we had “solved a huge data challenge” his team had been wrestling with for years. Lt. Col. Kemmerlin put it more simply: "Everyone in the DoD needs this."
Seven years later, I still think about those early conversations.
Kana Systems has since grown into one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, ranking #2,722 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 and #89 in government services.
What makes this journey especially meaningful to me is the people I've been fortunate enough to share it with.
From our earliest days, my ʻohana has been part of building Kana Systems, including two of my children and my brother. Not many people get to build a company alongside their family, and I don't take that blessing for granted.
And over the years, our Kana Systems ʻohana has grown to include an incredible team of people who bring their talents, aloha and commitment to our mission every day.
Our story is happening because of how we chose to build, and because of the people we built it with and for.
Our most important value at Kana Systems is Aloha Spirit. For us, Aloha means helping others flourish.
In our world, that starts with remembering that there is always a person behind the mission. The warfighters and professionals we build for aren't job titles or just "users." They are people carrying real responsibility for our national security.
If our technology can give someone back hours, days or weeks they were spending processing information, they can spend that time doing the work that actually needs their expertise. That's what success looks like to us.
One Pentagon customer recently set out to measure that impact. Their goal was to double their team's productivity using the Kana platform. The result exceeded that target by 38 times.
Numbers like that are exciting. But what matters to me is what the number represents: people getting their time back.
My personal (and most important) metric that I track is “Aloha Spirit Delivered.”
There will be plenty of opportunities on this blog to share the growth, customer wins and milestones. But those aren't the whole story.
The real story is everything that happened between that first no and where we are today.
It's the people who believed in us. The customers who trusted us with hard problems. The things we got right. The things we had to learn. And the people across Kana Systems who made all of it possible.
Those are the stories we want to tell here.
Seven years ago, a group of people at the Department of Defense saw something in me, and in the kind of company we could build, before I could see it myself. I'm glad they didn't take my first no for an answer.
And that's a lesson I've carried with me: saying yes isn't about knowing exactly where something will lead.
It's about recognizing the people worth believing in, the problems worth solving, and the opportunity to help people flourish in their important jobs.
With aloha,
Mailani
