defense-ai
(12)
Colby Adcock Is Moving AI From the Deal Room to the Dirt
After fourteen years in finance, the Scout AI co-founder is betting that the next important interface will not live on a screen. It will connect a commander's intent to machines working at the tactical edge.
Ben Van Roo Is Building the Boring Bridges AI Needs
Before chatbots became a boardroom obsession, Ben Van Roo was tracing military supply chains and wrestling software into real workflows. At Legion Intelligence, his wager is that AI's future belongs to the unglamorous layer between a clever model and a consequential decision.
OnDeck AI
OnDeck AI is a Vancouver-based Y Combinator (S25) company building Perception-0, a vision model that lets organizations find any object, behavior, or event in video footage using plain language - without collecting training data or building a custom computer-vision pipeline. Started as a fisheries-monitoring project, it now serves defense agencies, robotics teams, and security operators, including a pilot with Singapore's Ministry of Defence.
Pryon
Pryon is a Raleigh, North Carolina enterprise AI company that builds a secure retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) platform for regulated organizations. Founded in 2017 by Igor Jablokov - the entrepreneur whose earlier voice-recognition company Yap became Amazon's first AI acquisition and seeded Alexa - Pryon ingests text, audio, images and video from enterprise systems and pairs that content with large language models to deliver fast, source-attributed answers. Its RAG Suite and Memory Layer are designed to run anywhere from public cloud to fully air-gapped environments, targeting customers in government, defense, energy, life sciences, manufacturing and finance where accuracy, security and verifiability matter more than novelty.
dMetrics
dMetrics is an AI company that builds Minsky, a natural-language-processing platform letting non-technical subject-matter experts create their own AI models to read, track, and analyze huge volumes of messy text - without writing code. Founded by two MIT machine-learning PhDs, the company started by decoding healthcare conversations across social media and now serves financial, pharmaceutical, and public-sector customers, including a five-year, $99.5M U.S. Department of Defense production contract for open-source threat analysis.
James Rebesco
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Paul Nemirovsky
Paul Nemirovsky is the cofounder and CEO of dMetrics, the Brooklyn-born AI company behind Minsky, a natural language processing platform that lets non-technical experts steer AI across the world's largest financial, pharmaceutical, and public-sector organizations. An MIT Media Lab PhD who once built musical navigation shoes and showed interactive art at the Centre Pompidou, he has grown dMetrics from two founders to a 40-person team without venture capital, and in 2024 the company landed a Department of Defense AI/ML production contract worth up to $99.5 million.
Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'
Smack Technologies Inc.
Smack Technologies is a frontier AI lab for national security, founded in 2024 by two Marine Special Operations veterans, Andy Markoff and Clint Alanis. The company builds domain-specific AI models trained through deep reinforcement learning inside proprietary synthetic warfare environments. Its goal is what it calls 'Decision Dominance' - compressing the Orient and Decide phases of the military OODA loop from months to minutes. Two product suites carry the work: Omega, a command-level stack that turns commander intent into executable plans, and Alpha, an edge stack with lightweight models and proprietary hardware for tactical platforms operating in degraded, low-bandwidth conditions. Smack raised $32M in combined seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, and has secured seven-figure contracts with the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
Striveworks
Striveworks is an Austin-based AI operations company whose Chariot platform helps organizations build, deploy, monitor, and retrain machine learning models in hours rather than months. Built for highly regulated and contested environments - especially U.S. national security and allied defense - Chariot pairs a fast MLOps workflow with end-to-end data and model lineage, giving customers governance and provenance over models that must keep working when conditions change.
Primer.ai
Primer.ai builds mission-ready AI for defense, intelligence, and national security teams. Its platform turns oceans of unstructured text - news, documents, intercepts, social posts - into traceable, decision-ready intelligence, deployable in air-gapped and cloud environments.
Sean Moriarty
Sean Moriarty is the CEO of Primer.ai, a San Francisco-based AI company delivering trusted, mission-critical artificial intelligence to defense agencies, intelligence communities, and enterprise clients. A veteran technology executive who began as a QA engineer at Citysearch in 1997 alongside future founders of OpenTable and Peloton, Moriarty went on to run Ticketmaster as its President and CEO, transforming it into a top-5 global internet commerce company with $1.5 billion in annual revenue across 22 countries. After stints as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and CEO of Saatchi Art and Leaf Group, he joined Primer in April 2023 to lead its mission of providing AI-enabled information advantage to those who support and defend democracy. The son of a Vietnam veteran and grandson of a WWII veteran, Moriarty brings both personal conviction and hard-won operational expertise to one of the most consequential AI deployments in the world.