Smack Technologies Raises $61m as the Pentagon's Hurry Becomes a Battlefield-AI Business Model
The battlefield software start-up’s second raise of 2026 is less about one company and more about the moment — where a government’s urgency has become a business model.
August 18, 2026 – 8:06 am
Credit: Smack Technologies
An Austin-based defense software firm, Smack Technologies, developing AI tools for the battlefield, announced on Monday its Series B round of $61m, its second funding this year. The rapid growth is driven by soaring demand from the US military, outpacing their hiring capabilities.
This round attracted investors including Costanoa Ventures, First In, Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, and others. It reflects a broader defense tech boom that has already secured tens of billions of dollars this year.
Smack Technologies‘ core product, Omega, is fires planning software, utilizing reinforcement learning models and real-time computer vision to generate targeting options within minutes. A second offering, Alpha, is a forearm-mounted display designed to replace traditional whiteboards, aiming for 10-20 prototypes within six months.
The urgency driving this development is attributed to the Pentagon’s concern about peer adversarial wars where communications are jammed, forcing decisions to be made locally rather than at a central command center.
“The future of war,” stated CEO and co-founder Andy Markoff, “will be more decentralized than any conflict we’ve ever fought.”
This thesis gained momentum after the Defense Department’s decision in March to eject Anthropic from classified work due to supply chain risks, leading the Marine Corps and Navy to court smaller vendors like Smack Technologies.
The company has rapidly expanded from 19 employees in April to 51 today, projecting 85 by year-end. This rapid growth is driven by customer demand rather than organic expansion.
However, this swift technological advancement raises ethical concerns regarding the role of humans in decision-making processes as AI systems make recommendations at machine speed, potentially reducing human intervention time. Smack Technologies, like others in the sector, emphasizes that a person remains integral to the loop; yet, skeptics worry about the shrinking role of human oversight.