SMACK Technologies, co-founded by MARSOC veterans Andrew Markoff and Clint Alanis, announced $32 million in combined seed and Series A funding on March 2. Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures led the Series A. Point72 Ventures led the earlier seed round. Additional participation came from Felicis, Scribble Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and several other investors.
The company says it’s building domain-specific AI models powered by deep reinforcement learning for military decision-making. Its product suites, called Omega and Alpha, are designed for campaign-level planning across multiple time horizons. According to the company, SMACK has already secured contracts with the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
The timing tells a story investors should track. SMACK’s raise closed during the most turbulent week for Pentagon AI procurement in years. Anthropic got banned. OpenAI got classified network access. And a 13-person startup raised $32 million by positioning itself as “the first frontier AI lab for national security.” That’s the company’s own language, not an independent assessment.
The defense AI market is being reshaped by political dynamics as much as technical capability. SMACK’s “Decision Dominance” branding is vendor marketing, but the underlying bet is real: purpose-built defense AI models trained on military-specific data, rather than commercial models adapted for government use. Whether that approach outperforms general-purpose frontier models in actual operational contexts remains unproven.