Rising Star: Travis Sorensen

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Travis Sorensen, a service-disabled veteran, founded the digital services firm Oddball in 2015, and the company entered the federal market two years later after an 18F staffer encouraged him to bring Oddball’s agile chops to government. The company now works with several federal agencies — most notably the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

At VA, Oddball was part of the team that developed the Lighthouse Program — a developer portal providing APIs that allow outside organizations to tap into VA datasets. This year, Oddball secured its first prime contract — also with VA — to provide product and delivery management, software development, DevOps expertise and other services in support of the Veteran-facing Services Platform.

Oddball is a charter member of the Digital Services Coalition, an association of newcomers to the federal contracting space that stresses collaboration, innovation and agile delivery. Sorensen has been particularly active in helping other veterans launch their post-military careers and has expanded his own team to nearly 50. In addition to a growing base of government customers, the company supports commercial and not-for-profit clients across the country.

“We chose the name Oddball…because we do things differently,” Sorensen told FCW’s Steve Kelman earlier this year. “We take the time to understand the business case for the applications we’re building. We think this is a little odd in the federal market.”