It’s a big day for partnerships in the defense tech world. On Thursday, white-hot military logistics startup Rune Technologies—fresh off a $24M Series A—announced a partnership with supply chain visualization company Altana to expand Rune’s defense sustainment software capabilities. Friendship really does make the world go round.
Making unsexy sexy: Rune, led by Anduril alums CEO David Tuttle and CTO Peter Goldsborough, focuses on the “unsexy” parts of the military, as they recently put it to Tectonic. Their software aims to help logisticians get critical kit—gear, fuel, food, and parts— where it needs to be faster and more efficiently.
Their core TyrOS software:
- Uses AI and tons of data to track and move stuff more quickly and accurately than Excel spreadsheets and whiteboards, preemptively predicting future needs to allocate resources more efficiently.
- Is designed to run on low-connectivity edge devices down “to the crappiest Dell laptop,” according to Tuttle, keeping human logisticians in the loop to give them more options.
- Is built to provide air, land, and sea logistics support across domains.
Big picture: Altana, on the other hand, takes a big picture approach to logistics and supply chains, with customers including shipping giant Maersk; the US Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and State; and a range of Fortune 100 companies.
Rune says that Altana’s collaborative, AI-powered supply chain platform will enable their TyrOS software to “move beyond reactive, fragmented analysis to proactively identify and mitigate bottlenecks, geographic concentrations, and adversarial dependencies,” according to a company statement.
Rune on a run: “The Altana and Rune partnership combines two completely complementary and reinforcing capabilities,” Rune CEO David Tuttle told Tectonic. “The combination of Altana’s strengths and Rune’s strengths will hasten the advancement of truly data-driven logistics actions and drive towards modern ‘supply webs’ that in today’s environment must span both the military-specific logistics and commercial supply chain worlds.”
“This partnership expands Rune’s addressable use cases and users, moving from tactical and operational levels to the strategic logistics layer,” he added. “This expansion will allow us to continue to drive forward with full modernization of our military’s sustainment systems…[It] positions Rune in a unique position to deliver capabilities…from the tactical edge to the highest strategic sustainment echelons.”
So far, Rune’s tech has been deployed with the US Army and Marine Corps, and they try to test as much as possible in military exercises to hone TyrOS. But the world of military sustainment and supply chains expands far beyond the bullets and hardware, and that’s where Altana comes in.
“When we think about sustainment as a whole ecosystem, there are other parts,” Tuttle recently told Tectonic, “There’s inventory…there’s distribution…there’s medical…there’s personnel…all of those areas need modernization and modern software.”
Building Altana’s macro-level supply chain data platform into Rune’s tactical edge logistics aims to open doors to a wider range of use cases and users, from battlefield sustainment for operators to the big-picture planners looking for chokepoints and vulnerabilities in the commercial supply chain.
Anyone in the defense world knows that old adage, “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” With Rune’s military sustainment software speeding the hard parts of logistics with Altana’s supply chain-wide platform, the startup is hoping to give the professionals in the field the information they need, whether they’re in the Pentagon or on a boat in the South China Sea.