ABOUT BEN
Ben Van Roo is the CEO and Founder of Legion Intelligence. He comes from a military family (his brother is currently on active duty), giving him both personal connection to and deep understanding of the defense community’s needs. His career encompasses a combination of academic rigor and operational execution:
PhD in Operations Research with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison
RAND Corporation: Spent formative years working on military logistics problems, traveling to Air Force installations across Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq
Chegg: Joined as an executive pre-IPO, running machine learning, data science, and supply chain infrastructure. Experienced the discipline of public company accountability firsthand
Primer AI: Joined at Series A, founded and led the national security division
Ben founded Legion (formerly, Yurts) in 2022, before ChatGPT had even launched.
ABOUT LEGION INTELLIGENCE
Legion Intelligence is an applied AI company that connects AI capabilities to the actual workflows, processes, and legacy applications used across the Department of Defense.
The Core Problem: AI models have gotten remarkably good, but they remain disconnected from how work actually gets done.
The Legion Product: Legion builds the infrastructure that makes any workflow, across any environment, AI-enabled. The company’s offerings runs on edge, cloud, or hybrid environments; connect to legacy applications without requiring expensive system integrator rebuilds; and are model-agnostic (e.g., work with open source, proprietary, and government models). Ben also says they are the first to deploy an agentic workflow platform in IL5 and IL6 classified environments.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The Plumbing Problem Is the Real Problem
When Ben was at Primer in 2017, he watched open source models become “terrifyingly good.” But nobody was actually using them across their workflows. He realized it wasn’t as much about the model as it was about connecting AI to the six or seven systems people actually touch to get work done.
2. Find Champions Who See the Future
General Fenton at SOCOM was “light years ahead of everyone, including venture capitalists” in understanding enterprise AI. He wanted to bring AI across the enterprise before ChatGPT made it obvious. Legion secured their initial IDIQ contract because one visionary leader saw where things were going.
3. Get Technology Into Users’ Hands Immediately
The most important lesson Ben took from Primer was that feedback cycles are everything. At Legion, the philosophy became: “Any exercise, any event, anything where we can go—we’re going to be there.” Bring your own hardware, do all the work to get there, and prove it works.
4. Make Early Technical Bets That Seem Confusing
Legion was first to deploy GenAI on small form factors for national security. First on-prem. First on IL5. First on IL6. These investments seemed odd at the time, when others were just focused on the cloud. But they created defensible positioning as the market evolved.
For more on Legion: legionintel.com
Follow Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanroo/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
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