From Amazon to AI Startup: Sri Iyer’s Mission to Fix Government Red Tape

What happens when a film school grad turned infantry sergeant turned Amazon AI leader walks away from a cushy tech job to tackle one of the government’s most boring, yet most critical, problems? Meet Sri Iyer, co-founder and CTO of Kovr.ai, the startup using generative AI to take on the mountain of red tape strangling government and defense innovation.In this episode, recorded live at BlackHat 2025, Sri shares his wild career journey, why outdated compliance is cybersecurity’s biggest blind spot, and how AI might be the only way 80,000 defense contractors can survive the new CMMC mandate.From raising $3M in seed funding to hitting seven figures in ARR in under a year, Sri reveals how Kovr.ai is scaling fast, what GenAI really means for national security, and why sometimes the “boring problems” turn out to be billion-dollar opportunities.Sri's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sri-iyer/Kovr.ai - https://www.linkedin.com/company/kovrai/Ben's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-gascoigne-aa973317b/Aspiron Search - https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspiron-search/