Pentagon pressure to move AI faster drives Smack’s new funding round, CEO says
Visitors stand near a sign of artificial intelligence at an AI robot booth at Security China, an exhibition on public safety and security, in Beijing, China June 7, 2023. REUTERS/Florence Lo
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WASHINGTON, Aug 17 : 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.
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“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.
Source: Reuters
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