TSA Has 1,162 Scanners Installed. Its New Strategy Is About Getting the Next Ones Faster.

Recently, Juneau International Airport in Alaska got new baggage scanners. TSA put out a short notice about it. The Federal Security Director for Alaska explained that until then the checkpoint had been reading carry-on bags as flat two dimensional X-ray images, and that the new machines build a three dimensional picture instead, which lets an officer what’s inside without opening the bag.¹

It’s pretty easy to misinterpret the information here, so let me clear this up. Nobody spent those eight years inventing anything. Computed tomography is old technology. Hospitals have been scanning patients with it since the 1970s. TSA began testing it at airport checkpoints in 2018, and by July 6 of this year the agency had 1,162 machines installed across 296 airports, with the rollout still going.²

So the science was settled decades ago, the airport version was working and being installed at other airports from 2018 onward, and Juneau still waited until the summer of 2026 for its turn.

Those eight years were not research. They were budget cycles, contracts, testing regimes, installation schedules and officer training. Distribution, in other words. And distribution is where most of the time in this industry actually goes.

Why I am counting

In August, Intellistake entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NanoAi Technologies Inc., a nanotechnology and artificial intelligence company working on standoff detection of airborne threats including explosives, fentanyl and pathogens. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and has not completed.³

Since we announced it, almost every question I have been asked has been about the sensor. How sensitive is it? What can it pick up? How far away?Those are fair questions and I have already written about why the capability matters. But, these are not the questions that occupy me.

What occupies me is the gap between a device that works and a device that is bolted to something at an airport in Alaska. Juneau is the shape of that gap, drawn with a technology that had every advantage. Proven physics. A large approved budget. Political urgency. Vendors who already knew how to build the machines. It still took most of a decade to reach a regional airport.

Any new detection capability, NanoAi’s included, has to cross that same distance.

The number I have learned to ask about

I spent thirty two years in North American public markets before I thought seriously about any of this, as an investor, a director and a chief executive. You pick up a few habits. One of mine is that when somebody puts a company in front of me, I do not start with the product.

I ask how long it takes them to get paid.

The sales cycle tells you who the customer really is, how many people have to agree, what the company is competing against, and how much capital gets burned before revenue shows up. A strong product with a five year cycle and an average product with a five month cycle are not the same business, and the second one is frequently the better one to own.

Security technology has one of the longest cycles in the economy. Which is why something TSA published last month caught my attention more than the technology press seemed to think it deserved.

What is in Horizon 25

On August 24, TSA announced the Horizon 25 Strategy, set out by David P. Cummins, who was sworn in as the agency's new Administrator earlier that month.

The strategy names four priorities. Enhancing PreCheck. Improving the passenger experience. Expanding the agency's ability to counter drones. And streamlining the acquisition of new technology.⁴

That fourth item is a procurement objective, sitting in a public strategy document next to the things agencies normally prefer to talk about. It is there because somebody senior has looked at how long the agency takes to turn a proven capability into installed equipment and decided the delay is itself a security problem. Cummins arrived from the private sector, where he ran transportation systems internationally. TSA has also said that an evolved Screening Partnership Program will replace its short-lived Gold+ program, and that it intends to lean considerably harder on industry partnerships to deliver modernization.⁴

Money attached to dates that cannot move

There is a reason this has become urgent rather than merely sensible.

Congress has tied a large amount of security funding to a calendar. The fiscal 2026 homeland security appropriations include roughly $630 million for security and other costs related to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and about $1.0 billion for security, planning and other costs connected to the 2028 Olympics.⁵ The America250 commemorations sit in the same window. Every one of those events had its date set years in advance by somebody who does not care about contracting timelines.

A procurement schedule can slip a quarter and almost nobody notices. An opening ceremony cannot.

That is a very different kind of pressure from a budget line on its own. It turns the eight years from an administrative irritation into something with a deadline attached, and deadlines are the only thing I have ever seen genuinely change how quickly large organizations buy.

Where the time actually goes

Some of the delay cannot be removed. A device trusted with an explosives decision has to be specified, tested in a working airport rather than a laboratory, contracted, installed, staffed and maintained. I would not want to skip many of those steps.

But one part of the process is more fragile than it looks, and drug detection shows it clearly.

For years, police forces and federal agencies were being sold handheld fentanyl detectors with no common way to compare them. The Department of Homeland Security has described how new ASTM standards for fentanyl detection provided the first standardized guidance for evaluating field portable detectors against synthetic opioids, and noted that buyers now have a reliable method of assessing these technologies before purchase.⁵

Think about what that means for the years before those standards existed. Two vendors could each report excellent results, tested their own way against their own samples, and a purchasing officer had very little basis for choosing between them. The safe decision in that situation is usually to buy nothing, or to buy from whoever already holds the contract. Good chemistry sat on the shelf because there was no agreed way to prove it was good.

The two lines in our agreement I keep going back to

This is the lens I applied to NanoAi, and it is why two details in the agreement matter to me more than they may look.

The first is that NanoAi holds a royalty free license agreement with Gentex Corporation as a development partner for the Ops-Core RAILINK headborne platform.³ Ops-Core helmets are already in service. RAILINK is a powered rail that lets a sensor draw power and share data from the helmet itself. That is a route into equipment somebody has already bought, which is a far shorter road than asking a customer to open a new budget line for a category of device they have never purchased before.

The second is what happens to the reading afterwards. Our intention is to point our enterprise AI work and our blockchain infrastructure experience at the platform, so detection data travels along tamper evident pathways with a verifiable chain of custody.³ In a procurement conversation that stops being a technical nicety. It is what allows a buyer to defend the decision two years later, when somebody asks how they know the system was working on the day it mattered.

Back to Juneau

Most people assessing this sector concentrate on sensitivity, false alarm rates and form factor. Those things obviously matter, and we spend a great deal of time on them.

The measure I have come to care about just as much is the number of years between a capability being proven and it arriving at a small airport in Alaska. For CT scanners that number was eight, and not one of those years was spent in a laboratory. A federal agency has now put that delay on its own list of things to fix, which is better news for anyone building in this field than the market has so far treated it as.