The markets may be in a panic over AI (and, like, at least three other things), but the hype for AI-powered defense tech continues.
This morning, AI-powered geospatial intelligence startup Worldscape.ai announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’ve closed a $6M seed round led by Scout Ventures, with participation from Radius and Washington Harbour Partners.
The company—founded in 2023 in Washington state—says it will use the injection of cash to build out its Worldscape.ai platform, which “unif[ies] massive volumes of distributed data into a secure, real-time, decision-ready operating picture.”
Think one platform that looks a lot like Google Earth and brings together everything from ISR data to vessel and flight tracking in one neat, real-time intelligence package.
“We can take any geospatial source, all these data sources in real time, fuse them together, and build intelligent applications that our customers can experience more naturally,” Worldscape CEO and Product Officer Mark Bolz told Tectonic. “We have literally modeled the entire known universe—from space, to sea and subsea, all the planets, comets, everything.”
Bird’s eye view: Picture this: You’ve been tasked with planning a mission on the other side of the world, but first, you want to get a good idea of what’s actually happening in, say, the Spratly Islands.
Worldscape promises to give you just that kind of insight.
- Basically, the platform has made a video game of the known universe (yes, space too) that is fleshed out by whatever data inputs you give it. The whole thing is built using 3D physics and the same video game engine that powers Minecraft.
- The startup refers to the platform as a “data fabric,” meaning it can basically knit together anything from open source vessel and flight tracking data to satellite imagery, sensor data, and classified mission plans.
“Once we connect [customers’] data, we can bring it into an intelligent application environment,” Bolz said. “We have 3D physics [and a] spatial game engine that allows us to train AI intelligently the way we learn.”
AI agents train on the data inputted, then help users with “high-tempo defense and intelligence, workflows such as ISR, operational planning, and mission rehearsal,” according to the company.
“We train artificial intelligence on a video game stack to achieve very specific actions with agents so they can orchestrate a complex skill chain or supply chain or complex intelligence sensor tasking,” Bolz said. “All those kinds of things can be automated with humans in the loop, or on the loop, or fully autonomously.”
The idea is that the platform helps “customers achieve decision advantage faster than anyone else in the market,” he added.
Track it down: In one example Bolz showed us, he tasked an agent with figuring out the movements of an adversarial vessel over the past few days.
- When you first open the platform, you get a view of Earth with (in this example) little yellow planes all over it to indicate flight paths.
- You can then zoom in on particular areas (say, where you are planning a mission) to get a better idea of what is happening in real time.
- When the agent is tasked, it trolls data from all the different sources the customer has inputted to figure out how to best track these movements.
- Once it figures that out, it gives you a visual of how the ship has moved on its 3D modeled earth.
Two-faced: This kind of data synthesis and visualization can be used for everything from mission planning to complex task execution.
- Worldscape is also making a dual-use move—the startup says the platform can also enable “enterprise use cases including infrastructure planning, supply chain optimization, digital twins, and large-scale spatial analytics.”
- The idea is that the whole thing keeps data secure, while also allowing users to build and share applications on top of the core platform.
- The whole thing is also designed to work on the cloud and at the edge—basically, wherever that kind of visualization and mission planning is helpful.
“Across defense, government, and the enterprise, organizations are struggling with the same core challenge: data is everywhere, but insight is slow,” Cody Huggins, Partner at Scout Ventures, said in a statement. “Worldscape.ai…dramatically accelerates understanding and decision-making across both national security and commercial environments.”
Scale up: Bolz said the company already has some traction with the Space Force and has worked with enterprise customers, including a telecoms giant (though the company didn’t get into specifics).
And with this new cash money, the name of the game is “scale.”
In a statement, Worldscape said it “will use the funding to expand engineering and go-to-market teams, advance self-service onboarding and marketplace capabilities, and deepen partnerships across the Department of Defense, allied governments, enterprise customers, and hyperscale cloud providers.”