When Scale introduced Donovan, a large language model (LLM) platform built for the public sector, one of the top questions we were asked was, “Why Donovan?” For Scale, Donovan is not just a name, it is a tribute to the visionary Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) the precursor to the modern Central Intelligence Agency – and the father of modern intelligence in the United States. Donovan’s life and ethos embodies the qualities we value most, particularly innovation and a forward-looking vision.

Major General Donovan’s background spanning the Department of Defense (DoD), the Intelligence Community (IC), and civilian roles mirrors the range of organizations that Scale's Donovan has been designed to support. His legacy of innovation and leadership has long been an inspiration to many Public Sector Scaliens, many of whom served in the DoD and IC themselves. Naming Scale’s flagship LLM platform for the Public Sector was a fitting tribute to “Wild Bill.”

Just as Major General Donovan revolutionized intelligence gathering and operations, Scale’s Donovan aims to transform the public sector with large language models to enable mission success. With a model and infrastructure agnostic architecture, Scale Donovan provides users unmatched flexibility to seamlessly select from a variety of state-of-the-art models, including those provided by the customer, that can be fine tuned to meet specific operational requirements.

Donovan can be made available to organizations at any classification level and is currently deployed across various classified and unclassified networks. This includes an Impact Level 4 (IL4) provisional authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and a FedRAMP High “in process” designation from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB). Scale Donovan’s APIs and advanced retrieval augmented generation (RAG) capabilities empower users to uncover mission-critical insights and information from the thousands of available documents and datasets. Scale Donovan’s RAG capabilities enable users to converse effectively with their documents by asking questions in natural language and receiving precise answers with citations.

Hope you enjoyed learning more about Donovan the person. Now learn more about Scale’s Donovan here.