Profile traces how veteran’s frustration with disconnected acquisition cycles led to founding a defense tech firm built to move at the speed of the mission.
Fuse Integration Founder and CEO Sumner Lee is featured in a new WashingtonExec profile examining his path from naval aviator to defense technology entrepreneur. The piece, “Why Sumner Lee Took Design Thinking to the Warfighter,” follows how Lee’s experience as the Navy’s airborne networking lead, combined with a stint in commercial product design, shaped Fuse’s founding mission: applying human-centered design principles to military systems engineering.
“Fuse exists because the pilots, the sailors, and the soldiers on the ground were too often an afterthought in how military technology gets built,” Lee said. “We designed our entire company around listening to them first.”
The profile details Fuse’s rapid-response approach to defense acquisition, including a recent instance where the Air Force asked the company to deliver a complete system in six days. Lee attributes this speed to a deliberate departure from traditional acquisition timelines. “We’re taking a year or less to be able to field a new system,” he told WashingtonExec. “We’re taking weeks instead of years to turn around updates and enable field changes.”
The article also highlights Fuse’s growth, including back-to-back appearances on Washington Technology’s Fast 50 and multiple placements on the Inc. 5000, as well as the addition of President Scott Rosebush, whom Lee credits with strengthening the team as the company scales. “Scott is a transparent leader with a track record of successfully growing defense tech organizations at an inflection point,” Lee said. “He’s doing a better job building our team than I ever could.”
Read the full profile on Sumner Lee and Fuse Integration’s mission to modernize military systems engineering at WashingtonExec: https://washingtonexec.com/2026/07/why-sumner-lee-took-design-thinking-to-the-warfighter.
About Fuse Integration
Fuse Integration is a warfighter-focused, non-traditional engineering firm that designs, prototypes and rapidly fields tactical edge networking solutions for defense customers in the United States and allied nations. The company’s airborne and maritime gateway systems and virtualized network architectures are operational today, enabling real-time data sharing across air, land and sea environments. Founded in 2010, Fuse is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business headquartered in San Diego with a corporate office in Washington, D.C. www.fuseintegration.com
