Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: turn mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes.
The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer whose teams located insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intel. The idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation, he told TechCrunch. Pytho AI is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
As he explains it, war plans aren’t just for large-scale conflicts, what one might think of as “war games.” Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparation to flight missions.
Mearn saw the status quo firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team built plans the same way much of the military still does today: by assembling maps, diagrams, tables, and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then send them up the chain for review.
“It’s too slow for how fast the battlefield now moves,” he said. There can be more than 150 products and artifacts created during the planning process, and a team of five could spend roughly 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on one plan — of which, 70% goes into data management rather than strategy.
Even worse, plans go stale quickly, and time and resource constraints often mean mission aren’t updated or compared against alternatives.
Mearn used a conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. “There is a plan that exists that we’re supposed to be constantly updating based off new information and ready to enact at any time. That should be dynamic. Is it in reality?”
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