Cyrus Miryekta is the Founder and CEO of Ravelin US LLC, a firm committed to safeguarding America’s best asset, her innovators, from foreign ownership, control, and influence (FOCI) and shepherding them through the USG’s rapid acquisition enterprise (process?). Innovators use Ravelin US to harden their soft underbellies and ensure their survival, which in turn preserves America’s national interests.
Prior to Ravelin US, Miryekta served as a special agent with the Office of Special Investigations. Miryekta sought an assignment to Silicon Valley in 2014 after learning DoD had no CI presence. He has been awarded for single-handedly shifting the modern CI paradigm, his innovations were then scaled across the Department. Breaking a 70-year tradition of CI support by fiat, Miryekta instead leveraged American values of trust, openness, and patriotism to enable innovators to self-sanitize from a suite of options, establishing a whole-of-country approach.
As a Warrior in Residence at Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental) 2014-21, he set up the foundational due diligence and CI programs for DIU(x) AFWERX, and then SPACEWERX, which are today being scaled across the DoD. His impact was over $100b USD and Miryekta received an unprecedented 9 National CI Awards. Miryekta’s results were so highly valued by DoD’s space community that in 2019 he was administratively moved under Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC).
Miryekta was a founding member of the Defense Innovation Board’s Protecting the National Security Innovation Base Study Group. Miryekta has briefed Congress, elected officials, SecAF, a multitude of flag officers, and thousands of servicemembers and industry partners on CI threats to the innovation ecosystem. Miryekta provided CI support to Fortune 50 companies down to pre-stage startups, from Ivy League academics to world-class venture capitalists, and many in-between. He has also worked with and trained intelligence officers from seven nations on CI support to the supply chain, with global impact.
Prior to OSI, Miryekta enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2000 and served with the 82nd Airborne Division as an Airborne Fire Team Leader in both Afghanistan (from 2002 to 2003) and Fallujah, Iraq (from 2003 to 2004) where he was decorated for actions under fire, for saving a civilian from an IED, and for extracting wounded soldiers under fire. He was an auxiliary to 19th Group and others and has worked on multiple task forces in domestic and foreign theaters.
Miryekta attended college on the GI Bill, established a fitness business that funded graduate school, ran a small charity, and set up medical clinics in Guatemala with UCLA and NIH. He is published on Hezbollah in South America. He is an Advisory Board Member of Xplore, a dynamic satellite developer capable of dynamics hypersonics tracking.