Scout AI, a defense-focused startup, announced in April 2026 that it has raised a $100 million Series A funding round to develop AI-powered autonomous military vehicles and drone systems. The round was led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following a $15 million seed round in January 2025.
Founded in 2024 by Coby Adcock and CTO Collin Otis, Scout AI describes itself as a “frontier lab for defense.” The company is building an AI model called “Fury,” designed to operate and command military assets — beginning with logistical support and progressing toward autonomous weapons systems. Scout has also secured $11 million in military technology development contracts from organizations including DARPA and the Army Applications Laboratory.
TechCrunch received an exclusive tour of Scout’s training operations, called “Foundry,” at an undisclosed US military base in central California. There, autonomous all-terrain vehicles navigate hilly, off-road terrain while a team of former soldiers logs data to improve the model through reinforcement learning. The company has been training its models on military ATVs for six weeks at the time of the visit.
Scout’s technology relies on Vision Language Action models, or VLAs — a robotics control approach based on large language models first released by Google DeepMind in 2023. Otis, a former executive at autonomous trucking company Kodiak, said the unpredictability of war zones motivated him to pursue a more intelligent autonomy system than what he had previously built.
The company’s first widely anticipated product, called “Ox,” is command-and-control software that would allow individual soldiers to direct multiple drones and ground vehicles using prompt-like instructions. Scout is also developing munition drone systems capable of searching for and attacking targets, potentially without direct human intervention, though the company says such systems can be programmed to require human confirmation before firing.
Scout is one of 20 autonomy companies participating in US Army 1st Cavalry Division training at Fort Hood in Texas, with that unit expected to deploy in 2027. Founders say a significant portion of the new capital will fund the development of Scout’s own AI model built from the ground up.
Source: TechCrunch