In case you missed it, there is a new player on the unsexy side of defense.
Last week, a new AI-powered planning and logistics company called Watchtower Labs emerged from stealth with $35M in seed funding led by Shield Capital and Conviction, with participation from Founders Fund.
- The company was actually incubated by Shield Capital—the first ever.
The idea is to build “AI-native applications that help military leaders and planners anticipate what happens next in an operation, evaluate their options, and make decisions while there is still time to act.”
- If that’s too squishy, don’t worry, we’ve got specifics. They’re kicking things off with logistics planning—applying AI to get everything from vehicles to blood to guns to food where it needs to be, faster.
- The model basically runs a bunch of possible situations (what the company calls “possible futures”) against real-world conditions and lays out the best plans of action.
- Military users can then engage with a tool like a chatbot (like, in plain language) to sort out trade-offs and risks, then they pick the best way to move forward. They can also adjust plans as conditions change.
“We want to build a platform in which planners and decision makers can think and plan about the future rooted in logistics and supply chain constraints,” Watchtower Co-founder and CEO Akhil Iyer told Tectonic. “[We want to] allow them to manipulate that world, what the future could be, what the options could be to mitigate risk and to ultimately deliver the missions that they need to.”
A tale as old as time: Now, in case we haven’t hammered it home hard enough yet: Logistics win wars, dummy.
- Sexy drone gadgets are cool and all, but they’re not particularly helpful if you can’t get fuel to power the generators needed to charge them. Or the vehicles needed to bring them to the front. Or even the medical supplies to support the operators tasked with using them.
- Until pretty recently (like, a couple years back), logistics and mission planning remained pretty much in the Stone Age. We’re talking pen and paper and whiteboards, baby.
- But the rise of AI-for-the-military has brought with it a new generation of companies applying the wisdom of our little agentic friends to the nittiest and grittiest of battlefield problems—including logistics and sustainment.
Cool kids: Watchtower is betting that their edge in this whole nuts-and-bolts world is their team—both in terms of engineering talent and connections to the highest levels of the military.
- Iyer was previously a Marine Corps infantry and special operations officer before moving into defense tech investing at Shield Capital.
- Co-founders Souren Aghajanyan and John Morman are both former Microsoft engineers with experience building large-scale distributed systems.
- Head of Growth and Federal Mia Stender is also a former Marine Corps officer, and Strategy Lead Aaron Gibney is a former US Air Force commander.
- The company also has some serious defense-y connections. Shield Capital founder and former DIUx director Raj Shah serves as chairman, and the idea for Watchtower reportedly emerged from his conversations with Adm. Samuel Paparo about the military’s need for better logistics planning.
Map it out: Here’s how the tool actually works:
- Military planners can ask the AI-powered platform questions in plain English. Say, what happens to fuel and ammunition supplies if a critical shipping route (cough, the Strait of Hormuz, cough) is disrupted?
- Watchtower then combines operational data with AI and event simulation tech to model different scenarios, taking into account real-world constraints like transportation capacity, supply levels, and delivery timelines.
- The platform lays out potential courses of action, identifying bottlenecks, risks, and trade-offs between different plans.
- Commanders can then compare these options, pick their fav, and then adjust them as things (as they are wont to do) change.
Money moves: And it sounds like they’ve already got some pretty promising traction.
- Stender told Tectonic that they’ve been selected as one of the ten companies in this year’s NATO DIANA cohort, where they’ll be working to show that Watchtower can integrate with NATO’s version of Maven Smart Systems.
- The company was also tapped by DIU earlier this year as part of the Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program.
- Gibney also told Tectonic that they’re “at the end” of a SBIR Phase I with the Air Force, edging onto Phase II.
- Stender also said that they’re working with the Joint Staff to build a “joint sustainment decision tool.”
Far and wide: From here—as per—the name of the game is scale.
- Iyer said a lot of the cash money will go towards building out the team, especially bringing on more best-in-class engineers.
- Gibney also said they’re looking to expand into the other services, and start to explore more-slash-new product offerings.
- The funding will also mean they can go to more exercises and more theaters, Stender said. Basically, it means they can go to where planners and operators are actually doing the, well, planning, and learn about their problems straight from the source.
“[We want to] take this progression we’ve had over the past few years….[and] fully leverage that and integrate it into the services planning processes,” Gibney said. “That’s really where my head is at.”
