Editorial illustration for Scout AI raises USD 100 million to train war models, joins Field and Overland AI
Scout AI raises USD 100 million to train war models,...
Scout AI raises USD 100 million to train war models, joins Field and Overland AI
At a U.S. military base in central California, four‑seat all‑terrain vehicles snake up hillside trails. The drivers aren’t soldiers; they’re test rigs for Scout AI, a “frontier lab for defense” founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis.
The startup announced Wednesday that it closed a $100 million Series A round, led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, after a $15 million seed raise in January 2025. Scout invited TechCrunch for an exclusive look at its unnamed training site, where the company is teaching an AI model it calls “Fury” to handle logistical tasks before moving on to autonomous weapons. “Soldiers start when they’re 18… you want to start with that base level of intelligence,” CTO Otis told us, drawing a parallel between human training and the model’s development.
In addition to the fresh funding, Scout has secured $11 million in contracts from DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory and other Department of Defense entities. The money will fund the next phase of its war‑model training, a move that places the firm squarely in the emerging field of AI‑driven defense.
And like other autonomy companies, Scout's full stack also includes deterministic systems and other flavors of AI to round out its agents' capabilities. Young left DARPA this month to join Field after managing a program called RACER that asked companies to create high-speed, autonomous off-road vehicles, helping seed this space the same way that the organization's Grand Challenge boosted self-driving cars. Two competitors in this space, Field AI and Overland AI, were spun out of that program, and Scout also participated later.
The first applications of ground autonomy, according to Scout executives and military technologists, will be automated resupply: Carrying water or ammunition to distant observation posts, or in a convoy where a crewed truck might be followed by six to 10 autonomous vehicles, saving precious human labor for more important tasks. Brian Mathwich, an active duty infantry officer doing a stint as a military fellow at Scout, recalled a recent exercise in Alaska where he led a resupply convoy in total darkness and wished for autonomous vehicles to help him out. Adding intelligence to the Army's motor pool Scout sees itself primarily as a software company building an intelligence layer for military machines.
Further Reading
- Coby Adcock's Scout AI raises $100 million to train its models for war. We visited its bootcamp - TechCrunch
- Overland AI Raises $100 Million to Scale Ground Autonomy with U.S. Armed Forces - Overland AI
- Overland AI raises $100M to meet military demand for autonomous ground vehicles - GeekWire
- Overland AI raises $100M to scale autonomy with the U.S. armed forces - The Robot Report
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