Smack Technologies Raises $32M Series A to Build Frontier AI for National Security Decision Dominance
Smack Technologies just raised $32M in seed and Series A funding, and if you think this is another AI company chasing workflow automation, you are reading the wrong battlefield. This is AI built for deterrence, for decision making when the clock is not a suggestion but a countdown.
Congratulations to Andrew Markoff, Co Founder and CEO, Clint Alanis, Co Founder and COO, and Dan Gould, Co Founder and CTO, for closing a round co led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Felicis, First In, Scribble Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Washington Harbour Partners, Palumni VC, Fulcrum Venture Group, Anomaly Fund, and Fortitude Ventures. That is not a tourist list. That is conviction capital stepping into the arena.
Smack is positioning itself as the first frontier AI lab for national security, focused on delivering what it calls Decision Dominance to the United States Department of War, its allies, and partners. Not dashboards. Not prettier charts. Decision Dominance. The kind that analyzes massive volumes of multimodal sensor data in real time and translates it into action across the kill chain before an adversary finishes their second thought.
The origin story matters. Smack was co founded by 2 MARSOC veterans who looked at 2 decades of the War on Terror and asked a harder question. Are we actually prepared for a peer adversary. That question became a company. Andrew Markoff brings Princeton and Marine Special Operations, including serving as a SOF J3 during the Battle of Mosul and later operating inside Palantir. Clint Alanis brings more than 20 years of military leadership and multinational coordination. Dan Gould brings computational science from Brown and the experience of scaling Tinder to $1B in revenue. Combat credibility meets consumer scale. That mix is not accidental.
The product architecture is clean and unapologetic. Omega focuses on campaign informed planning 1–6 months out. Alpha handles the near fight, from 1–4 days ahead to right now. Both are powered by deep reinforcement learning models trained in synthetic warfare environments, engineered to reason through time and space with constrained resources in seconds. This is physics rooted AI, not slide deck intelligence.
The $32M will scale technical leadership and accelerate research and development across all branches of the military. Smack already reports contracts with several branches, including the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Warfighting Lab. El Segundo is not just a zip code here. It is a launch point.
The takeaway for founders is simple and sharp. Domain obsession wins. Smack did not build generic AI and hunt for a problem. It started with a mission level pain point and built models around it. Investors followed clarity, not hype.
And for defense leaders watching the horizon, the question is not whether AI will shape modern conflict. It is who will trust it when the stakes are absolute. Smack Technologies is betting that trust is earned in milliseconds, not marketing copy.