David Tuttle

In a windowless tactical operations center, the thing most likely to lose a battle is not a missing soldier. It is a missing battery, a fuel pallet that never arrived, a forecast that assumed the network would stay up. David Tuttle has watched that problem from the inside, and he built a company around fixing it.

Tuttle is the cofounder and CEO of Rune Technologies, an Arlington, Virginia company building TyrOS - an AI-enabled predictive logistics platform designed for the one place most software gives up: a contested battlefield where communications are jammed, degraded, or simply gone. The platform's defining trait is an edge-first architecture. It runs computation down at the tactical level rather than phoning home to a distant server, so it keeps forecasting supply needs even when a unit is cut off.

That design choice is not a feature. It is a worldview. "Sustainment as a warfighting function is inherently bottom-up," Tuttle says - and Rune's software is shaped to match the way logistics actually moves through a fighting force, from the foxhole upward, not from headquarters down.

The stakes are concrete. Rune closed a $24 million Series A in July 2025, led by Human Capital, with Pax VC and Washington Harbour Partners joining and existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, and Forward Deployed VC returning. Add the February 2025 seed round and Rune raised more than $30 million in roughly a year - a striking pace for a company founded in 2024.

TyrOS is not a slide deck. It has been deployed with U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps units. Rune integrated the platform with Palantir's Defense OSDK and was selected for the Palantir Startup Fellowship. In February 2026, the company joined Team Anduril on the U.S. Army's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype, putting Rune's logistics layer inside one of the Army's marquee modernization efforts.

Tuttle's path to all of this is the opposite of linear. He commissioned as a U.S. Army field artillery officer and deployed to Afghanistan, with stops at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and Fort Drum, New York. Then he did something most artillery officers never do: he went to Wall Street. After Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, he worked in aerospace and defense investment banking, learning to read balance sheets and decode how the Pentagon actually budgets - earning FINRA Series 63 and Series 79 licenses along the way.

He did not stay at a desk. Tuttle returned to uniform, leading software teams within the JSOC enterprise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina - special operations, where the gap between a good tool and a useless one is measured in lives. From there he joined Anduril Industries as Capabilities Lead for C4 Systems, building the command-and-control hardware business and, by his own account, cultivating relationships with elite engineers. One of them, Peter Goldsborough, became Rune's cofounder and CTO.

Tuttle calls this a compound-learning path. The toolkit, he argues, came "from selling beverages to analyzing balance sheets to leading special operations software teams." It is an unusual sentence to find in a defense founder's bio - the beverage part traces to a stint at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, where he earned a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Each rung looks like a detour until you see what he assembled from them: a person who can sit in an acquisition office, a requirements shop, and an operational unit and speak all three dialects.

That fluency shows up in how he talks about selling to the government. Tuttle's "three plates" framework is blunt about why most defense startups stall. "You really have to spin three plates simultaneously," he says - the acquisition offices that hold the money, the requirements generators that define the need, and the operational units that actually use the thing. Drop one and the others stop returning calls. Focus only on acquisition, he warns, and they will ask where your operational champions are.

The mission statement he repeats is almost stubbornly plain: bring military logistics sophistication in line with the prowess of our fighting capabilities. The United States can put a precision weapon on a target from the other side of the world. It still tracks a lot of its beans, bullets, and batteries with tools that would embarrass a mid-size trucking company. Rune's bet is that the next decisive edge is not a faster jet. It is knowing what a unit will run out of before the unit does.

There is a tell in the product name. TyrOS evokes Tyr, the Norse god of war who, in the old stories, sacrificed a hand to bind a monster - a god associated less with glory than with the costs and the binding contracts of conflict. For a company whose whole pitch is that the unglamorous backbone of war deserves better software, it is a fitting flag to fly.

Tuttle still serves in the National Guard while running the company - a detail that says as much about him as any funding round. He is not a founder who studied the customer from afar. He is the customer, on weekends, in uniform, still close enough to the problem to feel it. The investors who wrote the checks tend to describe the founding team the same way: deep operational experience welded to elite software talent, a combination one backer called "uncommon but increasingly powerful."

It helps to understand why the timing favors him. For two decades, American forces fought wars where the supply tail was rarely under serious threat - convoys rolled, networks held, and the comfortable assumption was that the logistics picture would always be visible. A fight against a peer adversary erases that assumption. Communications get contested, satellite links flicker, and the neat dashboard at headquarters goes stale the moment a unit is cut off. Software written for the easy decades simply stops working in the hard ones. Rune's edge-first design is a direct answer to that shift, and the Pentagon's growing appetite for it is why a 2024 startup could raise tens of millions so quickly.

The team Tuttle assembled mirrors his own blend. Rune's people are drawn from the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, JSOC, and DARPA on the military side, and from Anduril and Facebook on the technology side. The company frames its mission in service language rather than startup language: to be the trusted technology partner that rapidly delivers the mission-aligned information essential to logistics and sustainment decisions. It is the kind of sentence that sounds like a contracting document because, for this customer, it has to.

The work is early. A predictive system is only as good as its next contested deployment, and the defense procurement machine humbles even well-funded startups. But the thesis is clear, the early traction is real, and the person carrying it has spent a career assembling exactly the parts the job requires. David Tuttle is betting that logistics wins wars. He has organized his whole life around proving it.