Ijatsi Systems
Nelson Ijatsi was the second son of a very wealthy family on Nerem 5, and a spacecraft engineering student when the K'ril attacks began. He volunteered for the Republic Navy, and trained as a pilot during the short lull between their initial appearance and when they struck in force. Ijatsi developed a fascination with the K'ril spacecraft he was going up against, and devoted an inordinate amount of the time he wasn't involved in actual combat to puzzling out how the other side's craft worked. For security reasons, the true secret behind the K'ril ships' power sources was never revealed to anyone outside the high command of the Fleet, but Ijatsi was able to use his influence with his family to get one of their companies to bid on the contract to reverse engineer whatever could be reverse engineered from K'ril spacecraft.
Placed in charge of the project, Ijatsi brought in engineers from all across the galaxy. Although their directives were to reverse engineer the K'ril ships, Ijatsi and his team devoted extensive efforts to trying to duplicate the effects of components that they couldn't determine how worked. Pressed to show a profit on the enterprise, Ijatsi suggested going into the starfighter business themselves.
Although many traditional powers in the shipbuilding industry were shocked when a complete newcomer won a contract to build the Republic's next space superiority fighter ten years after the K'ril Incursion, Ijatsi's starfighters lived up to everything they promised.
Ijatsi's internal documents suggest they never discovered the true secret of the overpowered K'ril spacecraft, though there was some puzzlement expressed at the great deal of interest the Jedi Order showed in the corporation during its early years. Still unresolved, though, is the exact history of a great many of the engineers Ijatsi hired in his early project; many came from worlds that were apparently under K'ril control for decades before the war started.