Watchtower Labs Raises $35M Seed for Military Planning

Before a commander chooses a course of action, somebody has to establish that the force can sustain it. Watchtower Labs is building software for the planners doing that work, where fuel, transport, routes and time determine which options remain available. A change in any of those inputs can send the staff back through the plan.

The company emerged from stealth on October 21, 2026, with $35M in Seed financing. Shield Capital and Conviction co-led the financing, with Founders Fund participating; Conviction also identifies IQT as a backer. The money will support hiring, applications, testing and deployment as Watchtower expands from military sustainment into broader operational planning.

Watchtower enters that expansion with a government prototype award already in place. For defense technology buyers and investors, the opportunity lies in getting more useful planning work out of finite resources while keeping the reasoning available to the person making the decision.

What Watchtower's planning software does

Watchtower combines AI, simulation and optimization to help military planners evaluate operational choices. The company describes a system that takes questions in ordinary language, models constraints and presents alternatives with their assumptions and tradeoffs. Human commanders retain authority over the resulting decisions.

Conviction's account of the technology describes a division between language models that interpret a planner's request and deterministic engines that perform the calculations. The investor also describes turning operational documents into structured information. Those descriptions explain the proposed mechanism; the launch materials provide no public comparative benchmark for its effectiveness.

That separation has a practical consequence for a buyer. A planner needs to understand which aircraft, route or supply assumption supports an option, then examine what changes when the input changes. A recommendation becomes easier to interrogate when the resources required to execute it remain visible alongside it.

The resulting product sits close to an officer's professional judgment. Its usefulness depends on whether a person can work through the alternatives quickly enough to make a recommendation, including when the underlying information is incomplete. Watchtower's financing gives the team more capacity to develop that working relationship with users.

A military planning company built inside an investor

Watchtower was incubated within Shield Capital, where co-founder and CEO Akhil Iyer had worked as an investor after serving as a Marine special operations officer. Shield founder and managing partner Raj Shah is Watchtower's chairman. The investor consequently had a role in creating the business as well as financing it.

In Upstarts' launch interview, Iyer and Shah's search began with a request for better logistics planning from Admiral Samuel Paparo. The account describes an investment search that led them to build the company themselves. For a founder, that changes the assignment from assessing somebody else's proposed solution to assembling the team responsible for delivering one.

Watchtower's current leadership page identifies Suren Aghajanyan as co-founder and CTO and John Morman as co-founder and Head of Engineering. Both came from Microsoft engineering leadership. Their backgrounds bring distributed-systems experience into a company whose users must account for physical resources and changing operational conditions.

That combination shapes what the company has to build together. The engineering team needs to make the planning problem computable, while operational expertise helps determine whether the options make sense to the people using them. Each additional application will ask that group to agree on another set of constraints worth modeling.

What the government prototype establishes

The Defense Innovation Unit's Joint Sustainment Decision Tool update confirms that Watchtower received a prototype contract in January 2026. The program seeks tools for anticipating logistics needs and testing alternatives in contested environments. Its requirements include identifying risks and allowing users to examine different scenarios.

The program also provides useful competitive context. DIU identifies Air Space Intelligence alongside Watchtower in the January awards and records a June prototype award to Gallatin. Military buyers are examining multiple approaches to a related problem, giving them more than one supplier through which to explore the requirements.

For Watchtower, the award provides an institutional route into development with military users. The public record establishes a procurement milestone, while leaving the eventual scale of deployment, contract economics and comparative performance open. An operator evaluating the product would still need evidence relevant to the data and planning work of their own organization.

The program's emphasis on early integration with mission partners is particularly consequential. A planning tool has to fit how people prepare, compare and communicate options. That places the quality of the human workflow alongside the quality of the calculations as the product moves through prototype use.

Where the $35M goes next

Watchtower says the Seed financing will fund team growth, continued testing and deployment, and an expanding set of applications. The company describes logistics as its starting point, with wider operational planning in scope. The announced uses of capital are development plans, with their results still to come.

The formal financing announcement does not disclose a valuation or a separate history of previous rounds. A useful reading of the $35M therefore keeps the announced Seed event intact, without turning it into an invented lifetime total or a claim about the company's economics. Investors have financed further work on a specific planning problem.

Expansion increases the range of decisions the software may support. It also increases the range of information that engineers and operational users need to make legible to one another. The commercial opportunity follows that work: a planning environment becomes more valuable when a team can return to it as an operation changes.

For the officer preparing the next recommendation, the relevant development may be a new application, a clearer assumption or an alternative that can still be executed after a disruption. Watchtower's growing team will be working toward that next planning cycle, with the available transport and supplies continuing to set its terms.