Institutional finance, federal operations and engineering for defense hardware.
A small firm with exactly the right experience: nine years of institutional finance across infrastructure M&A, private credit and private equity, finance leadership inside a drone manufacturer, a decade of federal IT work for the VA and DHS, and engineering that runs from mission data pipelines to doctoral research in neural networks for drones.
Joe Bennett
Founder / Chief Executive Officer
Joe Bennett is the former Head of Finance of drone manufacturer Atropos Group (recently acquired by CHAOS Industries), with nine years in finance at Barclays, Michael Milken’s family office and two private equity firms. He has seen hardware financing from inside a drone company and from both sides of the deal table, including buy-side acquisitions in aviation real estate.
At Atropos Group, he led financial operations, built the company’s financial model and forecast, and worked on its debt and non-dilutive financing. Earlier, as an M&A Associate in Barclays’ Power, Utilities & Infrastructure group, he executed buy-side and sell-side transactions, including advising the buyer on the $2.5 billion acquisition of a state-owned electric utility. As Vice President, European Infrastructure Private Equity, at Ventus LLC, he executed buy-side deals in aviation real estate, a specialized niche: he underwrote air cargo operations and the property beneath them, and closed the €30 million acquisition of an air cargo facility in Prague. On the investment team at M-Cor Capital, Michael Milken’s family office, he underwrote more than 30 private equity, private credit, GP-stake and fund investments. He later diligenced more than 20 direct co-investments as Director of Private Equity at Council Oaks Partners.
He is a former Captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. He holds an A.B. in American Politics from Princeton University and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he earned a Certificate of Academic Excellence in Finance and was a Breeden Award finalist for the top finance student.
Claudia Córdova
Chief Operations Officer
Claudia Córdova has a decade of experience modernizing federal technology programs for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Health Agency and the Federal Reserve. At Fabius Group, Claudia leads operations, from planning federal contract work through delivery.
For almost seven years, Claudia served as a senior functional business analyst on VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization program, one of the largest health IT efforts in government: turning clinical and technical needs into requirements, managing risks and change control, and coordinating deployment readiness and Go-Live across VA medical centers. At the Federal Reserve, Claudia took AI and generative AI use cases through enterprise governance review and wrote the standard operating procedures for that process. At DHS/TSA, Claudia analyzed investigation cases in a Salesforce-integrated case management system and assessed generative AI tools against DHS policy. Earlier roles include change management and audit readiness across 11 directorates of VA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, and quality assurance testing for MHS GENESIS at the Defense Health Agency.
Claudia holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Universidad del Valle in La Paz, Bolivia, is an ISO 9001:2015 Lead Auditor, holds the CompTIA Security+ certification and is bilingual in English and Spanish.
Colene Copeland-Kruszynski
Chief Technology Officer
Colene Copeland-Kruszynski is a U.S. Army veteran and a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee who specializes in neural networks for drones. She holds a Top Secret clearance recorded in DISS, the Defense Department’s clearance system of record. She has built satellite-tracking software at Northrop Grumman and data systems at IBM and Accenture Federal Services, and gives Fabius clients an independent technical read on a platform and its requirements.
Her doctoral research applies neural networks to unmanned systems; related work includes vision-based navigation tooling and a prototype encryption toolchain. As a data engineer at IBM, she built near-real-time mission data pipelines for object tracking and categorization. At Accenture Federal Services, she engineered data processing for geospatial intelligence. As a systems engineer at Northrop Grumman supporting the Naval Research Laboratory, she owned the backend architecture of a satellite-tracking system; as a space systems engineering intern at Lockheed Martin, she automated satellite coverage analysis. She also founded AeroCopz, a free educational platform that opens flight training to women and spotlights female aviators as role models.
She served on active duty in the U.S. Army as a geospatial engineer. She holds an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Oklahoma State University, an M.S. in Medical Sciences from the University of Florida, an MBA from Mercer University and a B.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Kennesaw State University.
Wayne Quick
Senior Advisor for Veterans Affairs
Wayne Quick is a decorated, disabled Vietnam combat veteran of the U.S. Army with more than 40 years of experience in technology, marketing and sales serving senior levels of government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. intelligence agencies, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Wayne founded and led an imaging company that designed and fielded systems for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the first versions of the FBI’s facial imaging and electronic composite systems. The 13 largest states standardized on the company’s forensic platform, and its age-progression and facial-composite technology helped find missing children and earned top national awards from the computer industry. He also designed criminal intelligence and cross-agency information-sharing systems, the FBI’s bomb intelligence system, and intelligence and de-confliction systems for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, with identification and link-analysis products deployed at hundreds of federal, state, local and international agencies.
Wayne served five years on the board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and chaired its Technology Board. He was a frequent speaker at technical conferences and a lecturer at the FBI National Academy. He spent ten years consulting in telecommunications on disaster response and interagency interoperability, including building Nextel’s outreach to emergency responders. For the past decade he has worked alongside leading practitioners in addiction treatment, focusing on opioid addiction and brain injuries among veterans.
A graduate of Infantry Officer Candidate School, Wayne was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and served with the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam as the intelligence officer in charge of J2 Border Intelligence. He later served as officer in charge of a domestic intelligence unit at Fort Meade, Maryland. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia.
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