defense-ai
(6)
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.
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.