Scout AI — $100M Series A on military agent VLAs
Defense AI agents are the most underpriced category in this wave. Scout AI announced a $100M Series A Tuesday, on top of $11M in contracts already inked with DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and the DoD over the prior year.
Co-led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates. Founder/CEO Colby Adcock sits on Figure AI's board—his brother Brett runs Figure. CTO Collin Otis came out of autonomous trucking company Kodiak.
Two product lines. Fury is a Vision Language Action model running on autonomous ground vehicles and drones—an LLM driving the entire vehicle stack rather than acting as a copilot to a human operator. Ox is the command-and-control layer that lets a single soldier dispatch multiple drones and ground vehicles via natural language: go to this waypoint and watch for enemy forces.
The training data story is the hardest moat. Scout built a facility called Foundry on a military base in central California where they collect real vehicle operations data. Commercial autonomous driving companies cannot get on military bases. Open-weight models cannot touch this distribution. This is a true data monopoly inside a data-starved domain.
Why this lands: Anduril and Helsing started with hardware and bolted on software. Scout starts from agent models and adapts to existing hardware platforms. First real instance of an agent-paradigm company shipping military-grade autonomy that goes beyond AI-assisted analyst tooling. VLAs are the path Tesla and Figure are betting on for civilian robotics, and it turns out the military went first from demo to contract.
Link: https://scoutai.com
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Co-led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates. Founder/CEO Colby Adcock sits on Figure AI's board—his brother Brett runs Figure. CTO Collin Otis came out of autonomous trucking company Kodiak.
Two product lines. Fury is a Vision Language Action model running on autonomous ground vehicles and drones—an LLM driving the entire vehicle stack rather than acting as a copilot to a human operator. Ox is the command-and-control layer that lets a single soldier dispatch multiple drones and ground vehicles via natural language: go to this waypoint and watch for enemy forces.
The training data story is the hardest moat. Scout built a facility called Foundry on a military base in central California where they collect real vehicle operations data. Commercial autonomous driving companies cannot get on military bases. Open-weight models cannot touch this distribution. This is a true data monopoly inside a data-starved domain.
Why this lands: Anduril and Helsing started with hardware and bolted on software. Scout starts from agent models and adapts to existing hardware platforms. First real instance of an agent-paradigm company shipping military-grade autonomy that goes beyond AI-assisted analyst tooling. VLAs are the path Tesla and Figure are betting on for civilian robotics, and it turns out the military went first from demo to contract.
Link: https://scoutai.com
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