Team Neolens
Team Neolens
Stanford University
Field Failure to Frontline Fix: How Neolens is Reinventing Military Maintenance
The Team
James Leo
James Leo (Stanford GSB MSx ‘25 & GSE Learning, Design & Technology ‘16) is a former infantryman and intelligence officer who enlisted after 9/11. He’s held leadership roles across venture-backed startups and scaled a fintech platform to $25M with zero customer acquisition cost. His experience includes serving as COO at CaliberX, SVP at CLI Studios, and Chief of Staff at VIPKID, as well as venture capital investment roles at University Ventures and Learn Capital. James studied philosophy, business, and engineering at USC, completed executive programs at Harvard and Brown, and is currently an MSx candidate at Stanford Graduate School of Business with a focus on learning, design and technology.
Ostap Korkuna
Ostap is a technologist. He was winning international programming competitions in college, and building Facebook infrastructure and AI-powered enterprise applications during his tech career. Ostap’s roots are from Ukraine, and he co-founded one of the largest Ukraine-focused non-profits, raising over $160M for humanitarian relief.
Luke Andrews
Luke was born and raised in South Africa. He broke the record for the most Distinctions (15) ever achieved in South Africa final examinations. In addition to being a Robotics (Robofest) World Champion he also developed his own high accuracy, low cost, optical surface tracking sensor for use in autonomous robots.
Tricia Huerta
Tricia is a product leader specializing in zero-to-one strategy: turning ambitious ideas into real, working products that people love. In her 15+ years in Product she's worked across scrappy startups, SMBs, and global enterprises, built new ventures from scratch, led large-scale digital transformations, and wrangled plenty of tough integration challenges. Her passion for product lies in building shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers and designers in high-ambiguity environments, where creativity and execution matter most. Prior to attending the Stanford GSB, Tricia was ideating, pitching, building and launching startups as part of a venture studio in AgTech, FinTech, EdTech, insurance, and traffic management.
Overview
MacDill Air Force Base - U.S.CENTCOM
Problem Sponsor
USCENTCOM infantrymen need a system to map surface and/or sub-surface areas in order to gain a rapid, 3-dimensional model of a given location to be used in a variety of situations, including follow-on autonomous vehicle operations.
200+
Original Problem Statement
Number of Interviews
The Problem
At Stanford University, James Leo and Ostap Korkuna on Team Neolens set out to tackle a problem buried deep in the logistics layers of the military: how to equip undertrained operators with the tools to maintain and repair critical vehicles in austere environments. Their sponsor, United States Central Command (USCENTCOM), laid out a challenge with high stakes. Mechanics and operators across the CENTCOM region were struggling to keep U.S.-made vehicles operational. The culprit wasn’t just technical complexity; it was a lack of accessible expertise, inadequate training resources, and overreliance on cumbersome technical manuals. One-to-one mentorship, the kind of hands-on learning that builds real proficiency, was rare if not impossible in the field.
Leo, a military veteran himself, had seen this firsthand. “I was in a Stryker unit, and nobody knew how to fix the vehicle,” he recalled. “We had one or two qualified guys and the rest of us were just extra hands.” From Ukraine to U.S. special operations teams, the same pattern emerged: billions in equipment were being shipped out, but not enough support was in place to keep those machines running.
So they decided to do something about it.
The Innovation
Neolens’ solution evolved through relentless discovery; they conducted over 200 interviews across two quarters, spanning soldiers on the front lines, high-level Department of Defense (DoD) logisticians, Ukrainian warfighters, and senior commanders. What started as an AI-powered mobile troubleshooting tool for vehicle repair quickly revealed a much bigger opportunity.
After one early interview, a Ukrainian artillery mechanic reached out urgently in the following days. His team was using an M113 armored vehicle with no manual and constant breakdowns. He asked, simply: could they help? Team Neolens had no manual, no tool, just a goal to be "aggressively helpful.” So they found a manual, built a prototype in 24 hours and sent it back.
That moment became Neolens’ turning point. “Someone was asking for help in a war zone, and we could help,” said Ostap. “That’s when we knew what this could become.”
From there, the scope widened. Neolens realized their AI assistant wasn’t just a repair aid; it was a frontline data collector. At scale, it could feed real-time, actionable data into strategic logistics systems, cutting the lag time from paper notes to meaningful decisions. “We went from building a mobile app for mechanics to building a maintenance solution for the entire chain of command,” said Leo. “That shift only happened because we kept listening.”
They now describe Neolens’ minimal viable product (MVP) as an AI-powered troubleshooting and data capture tool designed for operators and maintainers with limited training and limited time. It enables faster repairs, more accurate parts ordering, and live data collection that can drive predictive maintenance across the DoD.
Team Neolens’ Hacking for Defense Experience
Team Neolens entered the Spring 2025 Hacking for Defense course looking for feedback and strategic entry points into the DoD. Having already begun their journey in the class “Lean Launchpad” the prior semester, they joined H4D to deepen their discovery and get serious about real-world impact. What they found was a rigorous framework and a network that made all the difference.
“This was the first time we got in front of generals and J4 logistics heads,” said Leo. “I met more flag officers in one quarter of H4D than I did in 14 years in the military.” That level of access wasn’t just eye-opening; it validated their mission. Senior officials called their concept a “game changer,” confirming that the problem was systemic and unsolved.
The hardest part, Ostap admitted, was actively not building. “We came together to build. We had users calling us from war zones asking for help,” he said. “But the course forces you to slow down, to understand the problem deeply before writing a line of code. That counterbalance was frustrating, but necessary.”
Still, the ethos of the team never wavered. As Ostap put it, their unofficial motto became: “be aggressively helpful.” It wasn’t just a phrase. It was the engine behind every prototype, interview, and product sprint.
What’s Next
Today, Team Neolens is continuing their mission through the Defense Innovation Summer Fellowship-Commercialization (DISF-C) accelerator, scaling their solution and growing their team. Their purpose is clear: help people who need it most, in the moments that matter.
“We never question why we’re doing this,” said Ostap. “The mission has always been front and center. Now, we’re aligning that with a long-term vision we can execute.”
Their roadmap is grounded in the communities they’re already serving. From helping a single mechanic in Ukraine to building a platform that can support field service professionals in demanding, reduced-connectivity environments around the world, the team is building with impact in mind.
“If there’s a million-dollar DoD contract at the end of the tunnel, that’s cool,” Leo said. “But that’s not the goal. The goal is to help, aggressively, and at scale.”
They are now seeking other mission-driven builders and mentors to join their cause. For Team Neolens, the mission isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.