Forward Deployed Engineer

Gallatin raises $50M to replace Army clipboards with AI. 8VC and Silent Ventures backed Gallatin AI's Series A, two years after 8VC's own programme incubated the company, while rival Rune Technologies already holds a five-year $99M Army deal. Gallatin AI, a company that writes planning software for military supply chains from offices in Washington, DC and El Segundo, California, has raised $50M. 8VC and Silent Ventures put money into the round, which Gallatin says takes its total funding to $70M, all of it equity. The product is called Navigator, and it is aimed at the people who decide what gets delivered to whom. It pulls supply, transport and maintenance data into one view, then helps planners work out how to move fuel, medical supplies and ammunition to units that need them. Woody Glier, the chief executive, described the problem in blunt terms. "A lot of the logistics data that is generated today is very manual," he said. "It's very messy, literally like clipboard and pen and paper." The founders come from large technology companies rather than from the established defence contractors. Glier spent seven years at Palantir and two building Scale AI's federal business. Chief product officer Brian Ballard founded the industrial software firm Upskill before TeamViewer bought it, and chief technology officer Daniel Buchmueller co-founded Amazon Prime Air after starting as a Microsoft engineer. Gallatin says that Navigator has supported American military exercises in Japan, Alaska and Europe, and that Army and Air Force users run it for tactical and strategic planning. It also runs inside Palantir Foundry, a data platform the government already uses, which lets it inherit security approvals rather than seek its own. The clipboard claim checks out. A chief executive describing the market he sells into is not evidence, but in this case an independent body has described the same thing. The US Government Accountability Office told a Senate subcommittee in March that the Department of Defense faces challenges supporting forces logistically, particularly in contested environments. One finding matches Glier's phrasing almost exactly. The watchdog reported that Army watercraft maintenance still relies on handwritten systems, with updates to repair manuals arriving late. The consequences show up in readiness figures, where a shortage of parts and equipment was the leading reason that 14 of the 18 Army and Marine Corps ground vehicles it examined were rated unfit for use in the 2024 financial year. Army watercraft rated fully fit fell from 75% in 2020 to under 40% in 2024. The institutional response has been slow by the watchdog's own account. GAO has made nearly 200 recommendations on readiness across its reports, and more than 150 of them remain unacted on, including recommendations on fuel storage and weapon maintenance in the Indo-Pacific. 8VC funded what 8VC built. The investor list repays a second look. 8VC led Gallatin's $15M seed round in 2025 and has now backed this one. The company was incubated through 8VC's Build programme, the same route that produced the defence companies Epirus and Saronic. That is a common structure in defence technology, and it carries a known effect. One firm created the company, funded it first and has now led the next round, so it is pricing an asset it assembled, and the signal a Series A normally sends is weaker than it looks from outside. The round's shape leaves another gap. Gallatin's announced rounds come to $65M, the $15M seed plus this $50M, against a stated total of $70M, which implies about $5M raised without being itemised publicly. No valuation, revenue or headcount figure accompanied the announcement. For a company selling to government buyers, those omissions are routine, and they also leave outsiders without a way to judge the scale behind the claims. A rival is further along on paper. Gallatin is not alone in this market, and a competitor has the stronger contractual position. Rune Technologies won a $99M contract at an agreed fixed price from Army Contracting Command for its TyrOS logistics platform, with an estimated completion date of 15 June 2031. The two products describe similar work. TyrOS merges supply, transport, maintenance, personnel and mapping data into a shared picture, then schedules deliveries against mission requirements. It is built to run on equipment in the field as well as in the cloud. Gallatin's public contract position is earlier in the pipeline. It announced an Army small business award in March, under a programme called PORTAL. The 18-month contract covers building and testing a prototype of its demand forecasting and planning tools with operational units. That difference is one of stage rather than merit, since a prototype award can grow into a funded long-term programme. A contract of Rune's kind is a permission to buy rather than a guarantee that orders follow, and the next procurement cycle will test both propositions. What has not been measured. The claims about exercises and users are the company's own. Gallatin has not published measured outcomes, such as shorter planning cycles, fewer units running out of supplies, or faster resupply, and no customer has published them either. That matters more in this category than in most, because logistics software is bought on the promise of a quantified improvement. The Army's own readiness data is detailed enough for a real effect to become visible in it. Glier also pointed at the problem the autonomy industry is leaving behind it. "If you had 1,000 autonomous assets, 10,000, you still have the problem of: what's going in them?" he said. That is the gap between a machine that can move and a system that decides what it carries. The authority question sits underneath the product, because Navigator generates suggested plans for logisticians to choose between. How much of a resupply decision a commander hands to software is the familiar matter of where an agent's authority ends. Glier was candid about the difficulty of the business itself. "Building a defense-tech company is not for the faint of heart," he said. What the round establishes is that investors will fund logistics software for the military at a time when most defence capital has gone to drones, munitions and autonomy. The problem is documented by the government's own auditor, and the buyers are already failing to meet their readiness targets. What it does not establish is which supplier solves the problem. Two companies are now selling overlapping products into the same Army customer, one with a five-year contract vehicle and one with an 18-month prototype. Neither has published a measured result from a deployed system.

Rune wins Army NGC2 award. 0 Comments On October 7, Rune Technologies, which builds sustainment mission command technologies for the U.S. military and allied nations, announced that the U.S. Army has selected its TyrOS platform for delivery to I Corps as the service's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort moves to production and scales across the Army. The award is part of the Army's initial NGC2 application awards, which carry a collective one-year value of approximately $93.6 million. NGC2 is the Army's premier modernization effort to help commanders make faster and better decisions by bringing data from previously separate warfighting systems into a common data layer. Under the production award, TyrOS will provide sustainment mission command capabilities across I Corps, enabling commanders and logisticians across echelons to view what units have and what they need, so warfighters can judge whether an operation is feasible before it starts and adjust once it's underway. The production decision follows Rune's NGC2 prototyping efforts with the 4th Infantry Division and the 25th Infantry Division. In July, the 4th Infantry Division used TyrOS at Project Convergence Capstone 6 (PC-C6) in Fort Irwin, California, the Army's largest employment of NGC2 to date. Rune's TyrOS also served as the division-wide sustainment application for the 25th Infantry Division during Lightning Surge 5, which concluded last month in Hawaii. Within I Corps, TyrOS will operate across all echelons, form factors, and at the edge, so units can continue the mission in denied, degraded, intermittent, or low-bandwidth (DDIL) conditions and maintain a shared sustainment picture. "We are privileged to be transitioning to production across the Army, with TyrOS moving beyond demonstration and prototyping to become how I Corps and the Army run sustainment every day," said David Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Rune Technologies. "Our engineers have been in the field with Soldiers through every stage of prototyping, and we're proud to now offer TyrOS to Army sustainers at all levels, from the company supply sergeant to the corps staff." Stay in the know with breaking news from across the IC and IC contracting landscape by becoming a paid subscriber to IC News. Your support makes its work possible.