Charles Lyons-Burt 
- Rohler has 33-plus years of Department of War acquisition and sustainment experience
- Valid Eval’s platform has supported billions in federal awards, zero sustained protests
- Five-year vision: the federal government’s standard decision-support layer
Dennis Rohler brings more than three decades of Department of War experience to his role as Valid Evaluation Inc.‘s vice president of business development, a position he took on in June 2026 alongside his appointment as land component commander of the Virginia Army National Guard. That dual vantage point — advising defense and federal decision-makers on evaluation rigor while simultaneously leading roughly 7,500 soldiers as a newly promoted brigadier general — informs how he talks about acquisition speed, trust and accountability.
He spoke with ExecutiveBiz for a Spotlight interview about Valid Eval’s evaluation and source-selection platform, its role in accelerating defense innovation programs and where he sees the business heading over the next five years.
ExecutiveBiz: Can you share with our audience the unique services Valid Eval offers? Where do you see the organization in five years and what steps do you need to take to get there?
Dennis Rohler: Valid Eval is a secure, commercial off-the-shelf SaaS platform purpose-built for evaluation and source selection at scale. We help program managers and decision-makers run complex group decisions, manage competitions, assess innovations, and prioritize resources with clear, audit-ready data rather than opaque scoring or email-based deliberation. Our platform leverages rubrics to codify acquisition procedures and technical criteria, standardizing inherently subjective judgments and producing high-trust, actionable data that can be defended in minutes and exported via reports or APIs for full transparency.
In practice, this means government organizations can evaluate hundreds of submissions in under 30 minutes, reduce evaluator bias, and generate detailed feedback to industry while maintaining the integrity of the process. Our work increasingly supports due diligence in federal acquisition and innovation programs, giving leaders a structured way to vet emerging technologies, understand relative strengths and weaknesses, and document the rationale behind awards and selections. The result is faster, more defensible decisions that stand up to scrutiny and, to date, have contributed to billions in awards with no sustained protests.
In five years, I see Valid Eval as the standard decision support layer for innovation and acquisition across the federal ecosystem, particularly in defense and national security. We intend to be the trusted platform that underpins due diligence for emerging technology, prize competitions, and source selection, with fused assessment capabilities that bring warfighters, technologists, and acquisition professionals into a single, integrated evaluation picture. To get there, we are focused on deepening our presence in defense, expanding predictive analytics and AI-enabled insights, and building partnerships that connect our evaluation data to broader mission and portfolio management tools.
EBiz: What defines the company’s culture in your opinion?
Rohler: Valid Eval’s culture is anchored in integrity, intellectual honesty and a commitment to transparency. We care about giving our customers a process that is demonstrably fair, where standards, methodology, and deliberations are documented and visible, and where trust in the outcome is earned rather than assumed. Our team blends learning sciences and systems engineering with a strong customer success ethos, focusing on making complex evaluation work intuitive, efficient and respectful of the time and expertise of evaluators and applicants alike.
We are curious and mission-oriented. Many of the programs we support sit at the intersection of innovation, national security and public trust, and we take seriously the responsibility to help leaders make better decisions faster without sacrificing rigor. That shows up in how we design workflows to reduce burnout, how we optimize evaluator matching to remove bias, and how we prioritize actionable feedback to industry so that every competition or source selection strengthens the broader ecosystem.
EBiz: Discuss one defense priority area Valid Eval is supporting.
Rohler: A central defense priority we support is the need to solicit, evaluate and field emerging technologies at the speed of relevance while maintaining integrity and defensibility in the acquisition process. Great power competition is pushing defense agencies to move faster, and acquisition professionals are being asked to execute evaluations for critical programs immediately, often at unprecedented scale. Valid Eval’s workflows and SaaS platform are built for exactly this environment, enabling defense program executives to make complex group decisions, conduct source selection and manage large prize competitions with clear, predictive data and high confidence in the outcome.
Recent work with organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit on the Autonomous Vehicle Orchestrator Prize Competition illustrates this role. We delivered a proven evaluation solution, custom rubrics and automation that helped DIU overcome logistical hurdles, track workflows and maintain total project awareness in a $100 million competition. That kind of structured, data-rich evaluation is a form of due diligence for defense innovation, ensuring that war-winning capabilities are selected based on mission-relevant criteria, expert judgment and transparent logic rather than ad hoc processes.
EBiz: How does the company leverage the latest in software innovation to support the mission?
Rohler: Our software innovation is focused on amplifying human judgment and making complex evaluations fast, defensible, predictive and scalable. The platform combines clearly defined rubrics, streamlined workflows, evaluator matching and robust reporting tools to reduce the time and effort required from participants while generating audit-ready records of every decision. We apply data science and machine learning to evaluator inputs to reduce bias, surface agreement strength, and provide ranking and comparison insights that help leaders see the signal in large volumes of proposals or technologies.
We also invest heavily in usability and interoperability. Our solicitation portal can be embedded in official channels, our reports and exports integrate with existing systems, and our training and support model is designed so that a program can be underway after a single session with the lead manager. All of this supports the mission by turning evaluation and due diligence into a repeatable, transparent and trusted process, whether the goal is to select startups that will succeed over time, bring warfighters into fused assessments, or accelerate the largest prize competitions in defense history.
Who Is Dennis Rohler?
Rohler was promoted from colonel to brigadier general and appointed land component commander of the Virginia Army National Guard at a change-of-command ceremony in July 2026, succeeding Brig. Gen. Charles Martin, Jr. In that role, he oversees the man, train, equip and sustain functions across roughly 7,500 Army National Guard soldiers statewide, with a focus on readiness, organizational health and resilience.
He joined Valid Eval as vice president of business development in June 2026, where he leads the company’s growth strategy across defense, federal and national security markets. He previously served as director of system/equipment availability and readiness within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Sustainment and as a senior program management consultant with the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell, and his logistics career spans deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. He holds a Master of Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College and an MBA from Grantham University, and holds a TS/SCI clearance.
What Is Valid Eval?
Founded in 2011, Valid Eval is a secure SaaS platform built to bring order and defensibility to how government organizations evaluate proposals, competitions and grant submissions at scale. The platform is designed around three distinct users in the process — leaders who own the selection decision, the evaluators they recruit to weigh in, and the applicants competing for the award — letting a program pull in as many evaluators as it needs while the system handles proposal-matching and strips out much of the bias that creeps into panel-based reviews.
The company is led by co-founder and CEO Adam Rentschler alongside a leadership team with backgrounds spanning Lockheed Martin, Bridgewater Associates and product design work for Disney and Goldman Sachs. Rohler joined as vice president of business development in June 2026, and the company’s board of advisors leans heavily on defense acquisition veterans, including a founding figure behind the Air Force’s AFWERX innovation arm.
Beyond the Defense Innovation Unit’s Autonomous Vehicle Orchestrator Prize Competition, Valid Eval positions its platform as protection against bid protests — one of the most disruptive risks in federal contracting — by generating audit-ready records of every evaluator judgment while giving losing bidders substantive feedback on where their proposals fell short.
