defense-ai
(6)
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.
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.'
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.