Smack Technologies Raises $61M as Pentagon Urgency Fuels AI Battlefield Tools Boom

Smack Technologies raises $61m as the Pentagon's hurry becomes a battlefield-AI business model

The battlefield-software start-up's second raise of the year is less a story about one company than a reading of the moment, in which a government's hurry has become a business model. A defence software start-up that most of Silicon Valley had never heard of a year ago is suddenly flush with cash, and the reason says a great deal about where the Pentagon is steering the technology industry. Smack Technologies, an Austin-based firm building artificial-intelligence tools for the battlefield, said on Monday that it had raised a $61m Series B round, its second raise of 2026, as demand from the US military accelerates faster than the company can hire. The round drew backing from Costanoa Ventures, First In, Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, and others, and it lands in the middle of a defence-tech boom that has already pulled in tens of billions of dollars this year. Investors are chasing the same signal that drew Smack's backers: a government that, after years of complaining it moved too slowly, now wants software in soldiers' hands at start-up speed. It is the appetite that recently helped Scale AI win a $500m Pentagon contract, five times its previous deal. Smack's core product, Omega, is fires-planning software, the deeply unglamorous but consequential work of deciding what to strike, with what, and in what order. It leans on reinforcement-learning models and real-time computer vision to generate targeting options within minutes, and to repair a disrupted battle plan in seconds, tasks that today can swallow hours of staff work. A second product, Alpha, is a forearm-mounted display meant to replace the whiteboards and grease pencils still used to track a fight; the company hopes to field between ten and twenty prototypes within six months. The urgency, chief executive and co-founder Andy Markoff argues, is being manufactured inside the Pentagon itself. Defence planners increasingly fear a war against a peer adversary in which communications are jammed and units are cut off, forcing decisions to be made at the edge rather than routed back to a command centre. "The future of war," Markoff said, "will be more decentralised than any conflict that we've ever fought." That thesis found an unexpected accelerant in March, when the Defense Department branded Anthropic a supply-chain risk and ejected it from classified work, prompting the Marine Corps and Navy to court smaller vendors like Smack. The courtship has since hardened into contracts. In July, Smack won two prototyping deals, one with the Joint Fires Network and another with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, together worth more than seven figures. The company has grown from nineteen employees in April to fifty-one today, and expects to reach roughly eighty-five by the end of the year. That is the metabolism of a firm being pulled forward by its customer rather than clawing its way in. It is also where the harder questions begin. Software that recommends targets at machine speed is precisely the kind of system that ethicists and some lawmakers have long warned about, because the faster a targeting loop runs, the less room a human has to meaningfully intervene before a decision becomes an act. Smack Technologies, like most of the sector, insists a person stays in the loop; the sceptic's worry is that "in the loop" quietly shrinks to rubber-stamping outputs that arrive too quickly to interrogate. The very speed the Pentagon is paying for is the thing that makes oversight hard. None of this is happening in isolation. European militaries are pouring money into comparable efforts, from Helsing's push to defend NATO from Russia to a steady stream of defence-AI firms emerging from stealth, and the commercial logic on both sides of the Atlantic is identical: whoever helps armies decide faster will be paid handsomely to do it. Smack Technologies two raises in a single year read less as the tale of one company than as a diagnosis of the era, in which a government's impatience has become a start-up's business model, and the question of who is accountable when the software is wrong is being deferred to a later, quieter conversation.

Pentagon pressure to move AI faster drives Smack's new funding round, CEO says

WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for the military, is raising funding to speed production of its flagship product and make wearable AI hardware designed for the battlefield. The $61 million Series B funding round comes months after the Defense Department declared Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" in March, a rupture that sent military branches scrambling to diversify their AI vendors and turned startups like Smack from afterthoughts into hot commodities. That Anthropic fallout led to Smack holding conversations in the spring with the Marine Corps and Navy, co-founder and CEO Andy Markoff said, with both branches of the armed forces pressing the company to speed production. The urgency stems from a broader worry he sees inside the Pentagon: a future conflict with a peer adversary would be fought in a decentralized, communications-degraded environment where troops cannot rely on constantly relaying data back to well-connected operations centers as the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The future of war ... will be more decentralized than any conflict that we've ever fought," Markoff said, adding that most tactical decisions will have to be made on the battlefield before data reaches centralized systems. Smack's core technology, Omega, shortens the Marine Corps' fires-planning process -- deciding what to target and how, and adapting in real time when munitions, sensors or shooters fall out of a battle plan. In July, Smack announced it had won two prototyping contracts, from the Joint Fires Network (JFN) and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. The values were undisclosed but the company said together they were worth more than seven figures. The valuation used in the Series B round was not disclosed. Participants included Costanoa Ventures, First In, Point72 Ventures and Geodesic Capital, among others. The company said Omega uses reinforcement-learning models and real-time computer vision to generate options in minutes and repair upended battle plans in seconds, addressing a kill chain the company describes as "vulnerable to disruption and too slow to adapt" in fast-moving combat. The new funding will speed Omega production and fund development of Alpha, a flexible forearm AI display, intended to replace improvised whiteboards troops have historically strapped to their arms in the field. The company has an office in Austin, Texas, dedicated to the effort and is targeting 10 to 20 prototype units over the next six months. Smack has grown from 19 employees in April to 51 at present, with plans to reach roughly 85 by year's end. (Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)