Smack Raises $61 Million Series B to Bring Intelligent Autonomy to the Tactical Edge

Smack is scaling the domain-specific AI that allows America's warfighters to achieve Decision Dominance across the Joint Force.

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Smack Technologies, the first frontier AI lab for national security, today announced it has raised a $61 million Series B financing round led by Costanoa Ventures and First In, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Nomi Capital, Felicis, Sapphire Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Fortitude Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Palumni VC. The round brings Smack's total capital raised to over $90 million as they rapidly expand their Decision Dominance platforms across the Joint Force.

The new funding will enable Smack to build the proprietary hardware necessary to deploy Alpha, its tactical AI platform, directly to the edge. While Smack's Omega platform supports strategic planning at the command level, Alpha extends those decision-making capabilities to warfighters operating in comms and compute constrained environments. Unlike commercial LLMs, Smack's AI is purpose-built to reason through the physics, resource constraints, and operational complexity of warfare. Smack will also use the new funding to rapidly increase model scope across domains and warfighting functions, and to recruit top AI research and engineering talent.

"The next peer-level conflict won't be won by the side with the most sensors and effectors. It will be won by the side with Decision Dominance, the side that can turn information and capabilities into action the fastest," said Andy Markoff, CEO and co-founder of Smack Technologies. "The DoW needs the entire decision-making process to become more autonomous while still making the correct decisions in an increasingly complex battlespace. Getting this right means putting humans in the process where they are ethically and strategically valuable — and removing humans from the part where they're not."

But right now, the defense industry is pursuing autonomy that only targets the platform: how independently a drone can navigate, how many vehicles one operator can control, or whether a swarm can coordinate against a target. These are real engineering problems, but they don't answer the military question that decides a campaign: can a distributed force act coherently toward its objective, while comms degrade in a DDIL environment, resources are running out, and the adversary adapts in real time. Autonomy has to be solved at the level of the campaign, not the platform. 

This is Intelligent Autonomy: campaign-level decision-making at the speed of the fight, decentralized to the edge. 

Together, Smack's Omega and Alpha platforms put Intelligent Autonomy in the field. Omega supports campaign-level reasoning at the command level, while Alpha pushes that same reasoning to warfighters and autonomous systems at the tactical edge. The result is an AI reasoning layer across echelons and warfighting functions. This is how Smack delivers Decision Dominance to the Department of War, and how America and her allies will win the next peer-level conflict.

"The nature of warfare doesn't change, but its velocity absolutely does. Warfighters today may have better situational awareness, but what they need is decision-making support at machine speed," said Arthur Karell, General Partner at First In. "Smack is leading the production of fight-tonight AI decision-making models, and we couldn't be prouder to support its highly experienced team of operators and researchers as they deploy these advanced models downrange."

"You can't simply fine-tune a commercial large language model, call it defense tech and expect to win a peer-level fight," said Greg Sands, Founder & Managing Partner at Costanoa. "That requires both a detailed understanding of sensors and effectors and the hard-earned, tacit knowledge that lives in the heads of people who've made decisions under fire. It also requires the right model for the mission, which is more likely to be small and physics-based than large and language-based. Smack is the first team we've seen build the training environment to capture that expertise and turn it into models that work everywhere the fight happens — from the command center to the tactical edge, including in low-compute, disconnected environments where cloud-dependent systems simply can't operate."

About Smack Technologies
Smack Technologies is the first frontier AI lab built for national security, delivering Decision Dominance to the Joint Force. Co-founded in 2024 by MARSOC veterans, Smack is building domain-specific AI models for the singular purpose of deterring — or winning if necessary — the next peer-level conflict. The company's products, Omega and Alpha, are designed to cut across decision-making silos within the DoW, enabling campaign planning in minutes and plan updates in seconds across all time horizons for the United States, its allies, and partners. Smack is hiring world-class AI engineers and researchers and continues to build its team of leaders from all branches of the military and defense. Visit https://smacktechnologies.com/careers to join the fight.

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SOURCE Smack Technologies