Scout AI Secures $100 Million Series A Funding for Defense-Focused AI Development

Scout AI, a startup focused on AI for defense, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round on Wednesday, led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates. The company announced the investment follows its $15 million seed round in January 2025. @TechCrunch reported that Scout AI invited journalists for an exclusive tour of its training operations at an unnamed military base in central California.

Founded in 2024 by Coby Adcock and Collin Otis, Scout AI describes itself as a frontier lab for defense. The company is building an AI model called Fury to operate and command military assets, beginning with logistical support and extending to autonomous weapons.

Scout AI has secured military technology development contracts totaling $11 million from DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and other Department of Defense customers.

It is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being used by US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division during its regular training cycle at Ft. Hood in Texas. The division is expected to bring along proven products from these companies when it deploys in 2027.

At the central California base, Scout AI has been training its models via all-terrain vehicles for six weeks, after initial use of civilian ATVs.

The company calls its training range at the base Foundry. Drivers at Foundry spend eight-hour shifts training ATVs and logging interventions via a reinforcement learning system to improve the model.

The base commander has asked Scout AI’s ATV to participate in security patrols. The company expects its first product to be a command and control software bundled on hardened computer hardware including GPUs, communications, and cameras. The company uses existing large language models as the base for its agents and has agreements with very well-known hyperscalers to provide pretrained intelligence for its foundation model.

Vision Language Action models, or VLAs, were first released by Google DeepMind in 2023. Collin Otis was a former executive at autonomous trucking company Kodiak. “If I handed you the controller of a drone right now and I strapped a headset on you, you could learn to fly that thing in minutes,” Otis stated.

“You’re actually just learning how to connect your prior knowledge to these couple little joysticks. It’s not a big leap. CTO Collin Otis stated, “It’s useful to start with someone who’s already made an investment and then say, hey, what do I have to do to teach this thing to be an incredible military AGI, versus just being a broadly intelligent AGI?”

Otis stated that Scout AI can get to scale faster because its customer has assets, referring to the Pentagon. He added, “The AI people don’t want to work with the military,” referencing Anthropic’s spat with the Pentagon over its terms of service. Otis stated that none of the AI companies are open to running agents on one-way attack drones or missile systems.

Young left DARPA this month to join Field. DARPA's RACER program asked companies to create high-speed, autonomous off-road vehicles. Field AI and Overland AI were spun out of DARPA's RACER program.

Scout AI participated in DARPA's RACER program as a later addition. A former U.S. Army Captain who leads Scout AI’s operations team stated that Scout AI’s munitions drones can be programmed to attack only threats in a specific geographic area or only with human confirmation.

The former U.S. Army Captain stated that autonomous weapons platforms are unlikely to fire because they are scared, unlike an 18-year-old soldier. He also stated that drones identifying their own targets are key to future warfare, as human-operated UAVs do not scale for facing large numbers of low-cost unmanned systems. Lt.

Col. Nick Rinaldi supervises Scout AI’s work for the Army Applications Laboratory. Rinaldi stated that automated targeting is hard and unlikely to be used outside constrained environments in the near term, but VLAs are promising for reasoning about threats.

Brian Mathwich is an active duty infantry officer doing a stint as a military fellow at Scout AI. Mathwich led a resupply convoy in total darkness during a recent exercise in Alaska.