HawkEye 360 has put William J. Burns on its board. Burns led the CIA from 2021 to January 2025, the first career diplomat to run the agency. Before that he spent more than three decades at the State Department, including stints as deputy secretary and as ambassador to Russia and to Jordan, then ran the Carnegie Endowment from 2015 to 2021. Since June 2025 he has been senior advisor for global affairs at Evercore.
HawkEye 360, based in Herndon, Virginia and listed on the NYSE as HAWK, flies satellite clusters that detect and geolocate radio frequency emissions. Radars, ship transponders, satellite phones and GPS jammers all leave a signal, and the company sells the resulting maps and alerts to defense, intelligence and commercial customers. It recently launched its Cluster 16 satellites.
Why a diplomat, and why now
Board seats for retired spy chiefs are common. This one is still worth reading. Commercial RF collection has gone from niche to routine in a few years. Analysts used it to track Russian GPS jamming around the Baltic, dark ships switching off AIS, and radar activity on contested borders. Governments now buy the data the way they once bought commercial satellite imagery.
Burns knows that buying side better than almost anyone. He also knows the diplomatic cost of the product. A company that can point to where a country’s jammers sit is publishing someone’s secrets, and allies don’t always like that either. Having someone on the board who has handled those calls from Moscow and Amman is worth more than a familiar name on the letterhead.
A smaller story from Ottawa
The same day, AirMatrix, an Ottawa dual-use company, said it won a second contract from Canada’s Department of National Defence through the Innovative Solutions Canada program. The value wasn’t disclosed. Deployment has started.
The work expands AirMatrix’s Libra platform. Libra takes feeds from several radars, RF detectors, electro-optical and infrared cameras, acoustic sensors, Remote ID and ADS-B, and merges them into one air picture with persistent tracks. It cues cameras automatically and uses AI to help an operator confirm what a track actually is. The company says it is also supplying technology to Ukraine and is an FAA-approved LAANC provider for US airspace.
The two stories meet in the same place. Sensors are cheap now. The scarce part is fusing what they see into something a person can act on, from orbit for HawkEye 360 and at rooftop height for AirMatrix.