Prewitt Ridge is Now SysGit, Taking a Major Step Forward for Agile Hardware Development
SysGit will revolutionize how vehicles and weapons systems are designed and acquired.

Today, we’re formally announcing the launch of SysGit. Now and going forward, SysGit is the name of our company, and our product. Put simply, SysGit allows engineering teams throughout the US defense industrial base (and beyond) to finally realize agile hardware development. SysGit will bring to the hardware world the same benefits that fueled the massive growth of software development, such as code-based workflows, version control, and pull requests.
We know SysGit will revolutionize how vehicles and weapons systems are designed and acquired. We have a fantastic team in place made up of top-tier technologists from SpaceX and Slingshot Aerospace, we’ve been assessed 'Awardable' for Department of Defense work in the CDAO’s Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, maintain active deployments supporting key programs, and we’re working every day to support the important mission of our partners throughout the U.S. defense industrial base.
This transition means that we are sunsetting the Prewitt Ridge brand, and we will be known as SysGit going forward. This is the culmination of a process that began more than a year ago inside of our team, our product, and our processes, but it has roots that date back more than a decade.
Working in systems engineering at SpaceX and Slingshot Aerospace from 2012-2019, my Co-Founder and former SpaceX colleague Zeke Brechtel and I saw how incorporating agile principles had the potential to improve time-to-capability. We saw firsthand how requirements management presented particular bottlenecks. It was the messy human layer of engineering, both in the coordination of dozens of specialized engineering teams responsible for the isolated parts of a rocket, and data sharing between the widely varying tools and formats those teams used to capture engineering parameters.
At SpaceX, during a time spanning most of the early Falcon 9s up to Falcon Heavy, I supported the launch of over two dozen spacecraft to orbit, I came to see requirements as the messy human layer of engineering. Zeke and I got involved in early efforts to find solutions through automation, and we got more deeply involved in the wider digital engineering community that spanned government and industry. MBSE brought improvements over the last two decades, but we could feel a groundswell for change as that ecosystem was held back by aggressive vendor lock, non-open “open” formats, and outdated processes. It became clear to us that there were many lessons from agile, iterative software engineering that could be applied to accelerate the development of complex hardware. Version control and pull requests revolutionized the software industry over two decades, and the hardware community could benefit from similar techniques, across industries.

Many entrepreneurs start companies to build the tools they wished they had. When we launched Prewitt Ridge and our platform, Verve, we started with, "I wish my engineering parameters could be accessed directly as numeric data via an API and shared with other tools.” We immediately saw that these challenges were being felt across the market, as we earned the opportunity to work with the U.S. Space Force, the U.S. Air Force, and innovative space companies such as Hydrosat.
We learned a lot along the way, and this all coalesced in 2023. By then, Verve was a mature Requirements and Digital Thread product available in the market, and we had the opportunity to deploy on a pilot to support a major defense acquisitions system. Our experience there laid bare the challenges of taking a SpaceX-inspired approach into a highly secure and highly federated collaboration environment. Key to this difference was that SpaceX was largely vertically integrated, meaning that most development work was completed in-house. By contrast, defense programs bring together dozens of distributed vendors, each using their own tools, often with proprietary data formats behind walled gardens. At SpaceX, I was in mission management, which was the main team focused on coordinating technical interchange with outside groups, maintaining the space vehicle / launch vehicle interface. In the Defense Industrial Base, interface management is a giant cost center unto itself. But at many organizations, there is still a discrete process where a highly-trained, highly-compensated engineer is working as a scribe to write things down for the purposes of meeting a contractual need. Requirements and system models are comprised of some of the most sensitive information about a program, and classification levels and security restrictions are necessarily inconsistent, even within a company on the same program. When it comes to time, the stakes of failure are higher in this federated ecosystem. If a test fails, it leads to a monthslong Failure Review board to find out who’s fault it was. You can’t optimize for, “Let’s blow it up on the test stand and see what happens,” and you can’t brute-force a digital thread across a dozen firewalls.

Our experience led to a couple of important insights that light the way for SysGit today.
First, it has become clear that our problem space lies upstream of systems engineering, involving interface management, acquisitions, IT, and security. We see an opportunity to support truly digital acquisitions, and to do that we must integrate tools and formats with teams across the dozens of contractors and thousands of vendors that work on a single program, while liberating data from vendor-locked tools and formats. We believe the answer lies with Git. The version control system defined agile software development as we know it, it is already used by many, if not all, of the Major Defense Acquisition Programs in some way, and it is battle-tested at every security level. That’s why we built SysGit with a patented data architecture that uniquely leverages an organization’s existing investment in Git providers such as GitHub and GitLab, as well as its existing Zero Trust security posture.
Second, we believe the formal release of SysML v2, the next-generation systems modeling language, is poised to make many of the promises of MBSE made over the last two decades a reality. SysML v2 allows requirements and system models to be captured in Textual Notation, which means it can be stored as code. This expands who can view model data, from specialized systems engineers to any technical user, and with SysGit we’ve leveraged this foundation to create an environment where no coding expertise is required. If we treat hardware as code, it opens up a whole new constellation of potential for automation, integration with software workflows, and more. We’re already working on tools that leverage AI to press this advantage. Equally as important, SysML v2 is purpose-built by the A&D industry. It was built by massive investment from over 50 organizations in the Defense Industrial Base and Academia, based on lessons learned from the last 20 years of Systems Engineering. The DoD and Congress made open formats and approaches mandatory through the 2017 codification of Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA), and SysML v2’s inherently designed modularity and flexibility represents the consensus of the hardware engineering community to meet that challenge.

MOSA arrives as many in the DoD and national security community are making a push to expand the supplier base to create room for new entrants and new companies to continue to propel the American technological dominance. In this environment, it will only become more important for engineering teams to align with MOSA’s mandate to write down what you're doing in a digital, shareable format.
While SysGit is a change in name and brand, it is a continuation of the project that came to fruition over the last decade to bring agile software iteration to hardware development. We’ve taken a big step from a platform with a novel data ontology that is like “GitHub for Hardware" to SysGit, which is literally Git for Hardware. Today, we can still feel the groundswell from the engineering community, alive in all of the companies that come together to support US defense programs. We need everyone onboard to complete the mission.
We hope you’ll join us.