If you thought we were done with the partnership news, well, think again. The mash-ups continue, baby.
This morning, robotics startup Crow Industries and Parry Labs announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’re teaming up to build Parry’s edge compute and autonomy stack onto Crow’s Fenris UGV.
“We were both finalists in the xTechOverwatch competition,” Crow Industries CEO and founder James Crowell (get it) told Tectonic. “We were able to integrate Parry Labs’ Phantom device and GEMMI—their C2 platform. So, now you can control Fenris vehicles from their GEMMI. [And] Phantom adds this extra layer of resiliency where you can do automatic comms switching.”
Crowell said that they’ve already demo’d the integration for the 1st Cavalry Division as part of the competition, and are working to deploy more with the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) later this year.
Ca-caw: Crow Industries was founded way, way back in 2018 by Crowell (a former NASA JPL engineer) and set out to build a “robotic labor force”—machines that can do dangerous (or just arduous) work where humans shouldn’t be.
- The company actually started in mining, but has made a hard shift to defense.
- Their flagship product is Fenris, a group 2 UGV that can carry up to 500 lbs and can be used for everything from CASEVAC to automated kinetic attacks. “We can do pretty much anything under 500 pounds,” Crowell said.
- The company says it made its first military sale “within months” of launching Fenris in 2024.
This isn’t the company’s first rodeo with partnerships, either. Crow and fan-favorite USV company Havoc AI teamed up to demo integrated land and maritime autonomy last year—basically, the ground vehicles coordinated with Havoc’s boats to make a “ground-sea robotic team.”
In the toolbox: Parry Labs is more on the nuts and bolts side of defense tech. The company was founded back in 2016 (we’re really getting vintage here) and focuses primarily on digital mission systems integration—the software and hardware tissue that makes all of the fun shiny stuff we know and love, well, work.
The company builds a whole bunch of different kit, including:
- STRATIA: Their mission software platform. Basically, middleware for, well, war.
- GEMMI: A multi-platform C2 system to control unmanned assets and their payloads.
- Phantom: A modular edge computing platform designed for drones and other platforms that need to run software locally. The itty-bitty edge computer can do everything from running AI applications to managing comms when jammed.
BFFs: And it sounds like all that worked like a dream aboard Fenris.
“We were able to fully operate our UGVs on GEMMI,” Crowell said. “The soldiers themselves were able to interface with GEMMI and tell the UGV where to go…We simulated jamming by just unplugging the receiver, and…there was no break in comms. It just seamlessly switched over.”
Vision board: From here, the plan is to basically offer Parry Labs’ tech as an add-on to Fenris. “As we sell Fenris, [we will put Parry] on our list of preferred payload integrators,” Crowell said.
Overall, Crowell added, the plan for Crow Industries right now is to scale. In the next six months, they’re planning to up production to hundreds of Fenrises and get to TRL 9 by the end of the year. By the end of 2027, he says they aim to be able to produce 2000 of the UGV annually.
We pointed out that getting to that scale sounded pretty expensive.
“I’m actually about to launch a capital raise right now,” Crowell said. “We’re talking with a few lead investors right now. We’re socializing the raise, to get that interest generated, and then we plan to have that close in the next couple of months.”