Mr. James A. Samuel, Jr. is the Founder & CEO of Pluribus Inc., a big data, geospatial analytics company headquartered in McLean, Virginia.  Mr. Samuel founded Pluribus to lead the world in an entirely new industry: Identity-Based Navigation®.  Mr. Samuel possesses an extensive set of skills and life experiences that uniquely qualify him to fulfill this vision.  

 

As a former Tier-2 (2-Star General-equivalent) member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service (SES), with over 30 years of federal service, Mr. Samuel solved numerous, national-level problems via positions of increasing responsibility, scope and complexity: National Geospatial Intelligence Officer for Aeronautical Issues; NGA Operations Center Director; NGA Country Lead – Djibouti, Africa; Senior NGA Representative to the ISAF Joint Command – Kabul, Afghanistan; Deputy Director of NGA’s Support Team to the U.S. Transportation Command; Geospatial Imagery & Data Analyst; U.S. Air Force Telecommunications Engineer and F-15C Fighter Pilot with over 1000 total flight hours.  

 

Prior to founding Pluribus Inc., Mr. Samuel served as the Chief of Congressional Affairs at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where he led the agency—comprising several thousand personnel—through 12 classified hearings, six public hearings, and three annual congressional budget cycles involving multi-billion-dollar portfolios.  He also delivered two personal testimonies before Congress and successfully secured a $1.7 billion military construction appropriation for NGA’s new campus in St. Louis, Missouri.  For these efforts, he and his team were honored with the 2017 Intelligence Community Legislative Affairs Team of the Year award by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.  

 

Mr. Samuel holds a B.S. in General Engineering from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an M.A. in Information Technology from Webster University, and he completed his Executive Education at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  He holds multiple patents and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the prestigious Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Defense Intelligence Senior Professional and BAAE Entrepreneur of the Year Award. ​