Defense corridor veteran. Serial founder. Patent holder. The person who built a telecom OEM from $5,000 to a $220 million Nokia acquisition — and brought that commercial instinct back to Huntsville to solve the AI assurance problem.
Marty Roberson started his career in 1984 in the Huntsville defense and technology corridor — a decade of senior technology and program leadership at BellSouth, AT&T, Nortel, and General Datacomm, working directly inside the acquisition culture, program office environments, and DoD procurement ecosystem where the defense industrial base operates every day. That decade built the technical foundation and the professional network he would leverage for everything that followed.
In 1994, with $5,000 in personal capital and a specific thesis about an unaddressed gap in DSL provisioning infrastructure, Roberson founded DiscoveryCom, Inc. Over six years, he built the company to $3.9 million in annual revenue, raised $3.55 million in outside capital, earned Inc. 500 recognition, and established OEM relationships with Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, MCI WorldCom, and Southern Company. In 2000, Nokia acquired DiscoveryCom for $220 million — a transaction Business Alabama Magazine called "Telecom Grand Slam." The product Nokia bought — LoopMaster — solved a technically precise problem in carrier broadband infrastructure. Nokia didn't buy the revenue. They bought the product.
Following the acquisition, Roberson stayed on at Nokia to lead post-merger integration across global teams and international operations — aligning product roadmaps, engineering organizations, and OEM relationships between the acquired and acquiring entities across multiple markets. That experience, sitting on both sides of a $220 million acquisition, shaped how he thinks about product strategy, market positioning, and the discipline required to build something a sophisticated buyer will pay for.
Since 2008, Roberson has led hardware innovation through OctoFlyer MM — a patented multi-mission drone platform for civil, rescue, and defense applications — and RoadRunner Advertising, holder of the patented RoadRunner Carousel motion-based advertising platform. He also developed the ApexEdge AI Gateway, an embedded computing product on NVIDIA Jetson and Raspberry Pi 5 hardware, reflecting his ongoing focus on practical AI and edge computing deployment in defense-adjacent environments.
SentinelForgeAI Systems emerged from a simple observation: the AI assurance gap is exactly the same kind of technically precise, systematically unaddressed market gap that DiscoveryCom exploited in 1994. The gap exists. The compliance pressure is building. The buyers are the same ones Roberson has been serving for 40 years. And the product — hardware-anchored, independent, vendor-agnostic behavioral certification — is the kind of defensible technical solution that sophisticated defense buyers will pay for before the requirement becomes mandatory.
No forms. No SDRs. No runaround. Marty Roberson is the right person to have the first conversation — and he answers his own phone.