Meet H4D Team Neolens
Rewiring Maintenance for Mission Readiness
As we continue our rapid fire series on our H4D Stanford University teams this spring term, we’d like to introduce Team Neolens, a battle-tested, entrepreneurial, and highly technical team focused on keeping U.S. military vehicles combat-ready in one of the world’s harshest environments.
Their mission: reimagine how maintainers and operators in the CENTCOM region access real-time repair guidance by building an intuitive and intelligent solution that streamlines the process, provides leaders with real-time data on vehicles and equipment, and keeps critical vehicles in the fight.
The Challenge: CENTCOM’s Vehicle Repair Reboot
In the CENTCOM area of operations, spanning from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, extreme heat, sand, and dust accelerate wear on vehicles like MRAPs, Bradleys and Strykers. Rotational personnel cycles, complex vehicle systems and limited mentorship make it incredibly difficult for maintainers to perform timely repairs. Paper manuals are outdated, impractical, and error-prone, while hands-on training is rare.
Team Neolens is working to deliver a solution that’s deployable in the field, tailored to non-expert users, and capable of providing smart, just-in-time repair guidance through an AI-powered mobile platform.
Team members include:
Together, Team Neolens brings battle-tested insight, elite technical capabilities, product design fluency, and a focus on user experience in extreme environments to their H4D team.
The Problem They're Solving
Across the CENTCOM area of operations where sand, heat, and dust wear down vehicles like MRAPs and Bradleys, maintenance is non-negotiable. But personnel rotations every few months, combined with minimal training and limited access to seasoned mentors, leave critical gaps.
Paper technical manuals are bulky, outdated, and impractical for field use. Operators are often thrown into tasks without sufficient knowledge of the vehicles' electrical, mechanical and software systems, sometimes creating more serious issues due to improper procedures. Meanwhile, the information provided to leaders is often inaccurate and lagging due to a highly analog process.
Team Neolens is looking to solve the problem by asking: What if every new maintainer could learn from an expert – anytime, anywhere?
Their research has identified key gaps:
One-to-one mentorship isn’t scalable. Yet learning on the job is essential.
Technical manuals are inadequate. They’re hard to navigate and don’t provide interactive guidance.
AR/AI-based assistants could transform troubleshooting. But only if they’re trusted and intuitive.
Deployment must be seamless. Solutions need to work across units and integrate with existing systems without months of configuration.
Military leaders need access to better data. Both predictive logistics and effective decision making require accurate, timely, and actionable data.
The Impact
A scalable, intuitive digital assistant delivered via any mobile device - e.g., phones, tablets, or smart glasses - could radically shorten the learning curve for new mechanics, reduce downtime for mission-critical vehicles, and relieve the pressure on experienced maintainers, all while providing leaders more clarity on the actual status of their supply and logistics. Beneficiaries could include Army Sustainment Command, DLA, USMC Logistics Command, Air Mobility Command, and SOCOM.
With more than 200 interviews already conducted, Team Neolens is well on its way to delivering a solution that could fundamentally change how the DoD trains and equips the next generation of maintainers and logisticians.
Because when the mission depends on an ever-growing number of machines, the mission is dependent on if those machines work.
All eight (8) H4D teams will present their findings at Stanford University on Tuesday, June 3, at 5:15 pm PT. Join in person or online via livestream. RSVP HERE to secure your spot and learn more about their innovative work.
Here are the other H4D Team blogs to date:
Team Hydra Strike: Good-enough systems, produced quickly at scale, will determine the outcome of future maritime conflicts
Team OmniComm: Creating Autonomous Multi-Network SatCom
Team ArgusNet: Turning Satellite Chaos into Clear Paths for Crisis Response
Team Omnyra: Building a Safer Future for Synthetic Biology
Team ChipForce: Team Looks to Build Incentives to Prioritize U.S. Critical Minerals
The Hacking for Defense (H4D) program has been taught at 70 colleges and universities around the world and has created 72 startups that have generated 660 jobs and raised more than $350 million. To learn more about the H4D course at Stanford University visit h4d.stanford.edu; to learn more about H4D around the world visit h4d.us. To learn more about The Hacking for Defense® Manual by Jeff Decker, PhD, visit Amazon.