Built on a decade of shared purpose
We didn't plan a startup. We just kept building things together — and eventually realized we'd never stop.
Nathan Gaw (Co-Founder & Technical Advisor) & Chance Johnstone (Co-Founder & CEO)
We met the way a lot of good partnerships start — by accident. In 2019, we were both new faculty members at the Air Force Institute of Technology when we happened to join the same team for a competition: use real-time physiological data from fighter pilots to predict future performance, all in support of a United States Air Force effort to enhance the pilot training pipeline.
We placed first.
More importantly, we realized something during that process. We think differently — Nathan from the biomedical engineering and data-fusion side, Chance from the optimization and uncertainty-quantification side — but those differences made the work sharper, not harder. That complementarity turned into a genuine friendship, and the friendship turned into five years of research together.
Over those five years, we built edge-computing and privacy-preserving AI systems that actually worked in the real world: federated learning frameworks for monitoring Parkinson's Disease patients under hospital privacy constraints, real-time physiological monitoring of pilots in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Lab, and on-device computer vision for human activity recognition using nothing more than a Raspberry Pi. Along the way, we mentored thirty graduate students, published in peer-reviewed journals, and contributed open-source tools in federated learning and uncertainty quantification.
The thread through all of it was consistent: build AI systems that respect privacy, run where the data lives, and put humans — not models — at the center of every decision.
When we left AFIT in late 2025, we knew we weren't done building together. The most impactful work we'd done had always been with each other. So we formalized the collaboration and founded sudo-rndm.ai — a veteran-owned AI/ML consulting firm delivering trusted, high-impact solutions for government agencies, defense partners, research institutions, healthcare partners, and small-to-mid-sized businesses.
Our research lab at the Air Force Institute of Technology — the team that started it all.
Today, we're exploring how edge-optimized AI — from pre-training and fine-tuning to inference — can power real-time, explainable guidance for the people who need it most. Our current focus is chronic disease management, where we're developing peer-to-peer systems that keep data private, keep patients informed, and keep clinicians in the loop.
We've spent a decade learning how to build AI that works under real-world constraints. Now we're building the company around it.
Nathan Gaw
Co-Founder & Technical Advisor
PhD in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University. Former Assistant Professor at AFIT with Top Secret/SCI clearance. Research published in Nature Scientific Reports and Radiology: AI, with nearly $800K in funded research. Specializes in multimodal data fusion, semi-supervised learning, and privacy-preserving AI for healthcare.
Chance Johnstone
Co-Founder & CEO
PhD from Iowa State University. Twelve years as a data scientist in the U.S. Air Force, delivering AI solutions across global operations — from scheduling optimization for fighter aircraft to strategic planning for counter-terrorism efforts. Former Assistant Professor of Statistics at AFIT. Currently also a Senior Staff Data Scientist at GE Aerospace.