battlefield-ai
(3)
Alex Fink
He watched his parents tune into Voice of America at 4 a.m. Decades later he is building the software brain for drone swarms - and an app to clean up the news. The through-line is simpler than it looks.
Swarmer
Swarmer builds combat-proven, hardware-agnostic autonomy software that lets a single operator command hundreds of drones - across air, sea and ground - as one coordinated swarm. Born out of the war in Ukraine and founded in 2023, its STYX, MINAS and TRIDENT products translate human objectives into autonomous action while keeping people in control of life-or-death decisions. The company's software has supported more than 100,000 real-world combat missions, raised a record $15M Series A, and went public on the Nasdaq in 2026 under the ticker SWMR.
Ian Kalin
Ian Kalin is the CEO and co-founder of TurbineOne, a San Francisco defense-technology company building the Frontline Perception System - machine learning that runs on the sensor at the tactical edge, without the cloud, so warfighters can spot threats in real time. A Georgetown-trained politics major turned Navy nuclear engineer and counter-terrorism officer, Kalin later became the first Chief Data Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and a Presidential Innovation Fellow before building the product he says he wishes he'd had while serving. TurbineOne has raised more than $55M, holds 20+ Department of Defense contracts, and works across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in the Indo-Pacific.