Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for the military, has raised a $61 million Series B funding round to accelerate production of its flagship product and develop wearable AI hardware designed for the battlefield.
The round comes months after the U.S. Defense Department declared Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” in March, a rupture that sent military branches scrambling to diversify their AI vendors and turned startups like Smack from afterthoughts into hot commodities.
That fallout led to Smack holding conversations in the spring with the Marine Corps and Navy, co-founder and CEO Andy Markoff said, with both branches pressing the company to speed production.
The urgency stems from a broader worry Markoff sees inside the Pentagon: a future conflict with a peer adversary would be fought in a decentralized, communications-degraded environment where troops cannot rely on constantly relaying data back to well-connected operations centers as the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The future of war … will be more decentralized than any conflict that we’ve ever fought,” Markoff said, adding that most tactical decisions will have to be made on the battlefield before data reaches centralized systems.
Omega and the New Kill Chain
Smack’s core technology, Omega, shortens the Marine Corps’ fires-planning process — deciding what to target and how, and adapting in real time when munitions, sensors or shooters fall out of a battle plan. The company said Omega uses reinforcement-learning models and real-time computer vision to generate options in minutes and repair upended battle plans in seconds, addressing a kill chain the company describes as “vulnerable to disruption and too slow to adapt” in fast-moving combat.
In July, Smack announced it had won two prototyping contracts, from the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. The values were undisclosed, but the company said together they were worth more than seven figures.
The valuation used in the Series B round was not disclosed. Participants included Costanoa Ventures, First In, Point72 Ventures and Geodesic Capital, among others.
Wearable AI for the Field
The new funding will also support development of Alpha, a flexible forearm AI display intended to replace improvised whiteboards that troops have historically strapped to their arms in the field. The company has an office in Austin, Texas, dedicated to the effort and is targeting 10 to 20 prototype units over the next six months.
Smack has grown from 19 employees in April to 51 at present, with plans to reach roughly 85 by year’s end.
The investment signals growing demand for defense AI tools that can operate independently of centralized command infrastructure. As the Pentagon pushes to field capabilities faster and reduce dependence on a narrow set of AI vendors, startups like Smack are positioned to capture contracts that might previously have gone to larger, more established players.
For military planners, the appeal of Omega lies in its ability to compress decision cycles in environments where communications are jammed or degraded. For investors, the Series B represents a bet that the Defense Department’s pivot toward diversified AI procurement will translate into sustained revenue for smaller, specialized vendors.