Smack, a frontier AI lab focused exclusively on national security and defense applications, announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding to advance AI-driven Decision Dominance capabilities for the U.S. Department of War (DoW), allied forces, and strategic partners. The round was led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Felicis, First In, Scribble Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Washington Harbour Partners, Palumni VC, Fulcrum Venture Group, Anomaly Fund, and Fortitude Ventures. The capital follows newly secured contracts with multiple branches of the U.S. armed forces in 2025 and will support technical hiring and expanded operational deployment.
Advancing Decision Dominance
Modern warfare increasingly depends on real-time analysis of vast multimodal sensor data and rapid decision-making across complex operational environments. Smack develops domain-specific AI models powered by deep reinforcement learning to enable faster, campaign-informed planning across immediate, short-term, and mid-term operational horizons. The company’s dual product suites, Omega and Alpha, are designed to break down siloed decision timelines and accelerate actionable insight across the Kill Chain.
Founded by Andrew Markoff and Clint Alanis, both MARSOC veterans with more than twenty years of combined combat experience, Smack positions its AI infrastructure as foundational to deterrence and operational superiority.
“In the short term, Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it’s the only goal that’s achievable before 2027,” said Smack Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Markoff. “Not enough has changed in how we run our decision-making processes in over a decade. In the age of AI and autonomous systems, that’s a significant problem. Solving it will require combining multiple different, extremely complex technologies to develop reasoning models rooted in physics that can make complex time-space calculations with precious resources in seconds. That’s what we’re building.”
Scaling Research and Military Deployment
With active contracts including the Joint Fires Network (JFN) and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL), Smack is expanding research and development to serve all branches of the military. The new funding accelerates product development, model refinement, and recruitment of advanced AI talent to scale defense-grade AI systems across operational environments.