GoKawiilAt a U.S. military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: It’s an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones.
The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis that calls itself a “frontier lab for defense.” The company said on Wednesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its $15 million seed round in January 2025.
Scout invited TechCrunch for an exclusive tour of its training operations at a military base it asked us not to name.
The company is building an AI model it calls “Fury” to operate and command military assets, first for logistical support, and then soon for autonomous weapons. CTO Collin Otis compares this work, which builds on existing large language models (LLMs), to training soldiers.
“[Soldiers] start when they’re 18 years old, and sometimes they even start after college, so you want to start with that base level of intelligence,” Otis told TechCrunch. “It’s useful to start with someone who’s already made an investment and then say, ‘Hey, what do I have to do to teach this thing to be an incredible military AGI, versus just being a broadly intelligent AGI?’”
Scout has secured military technology development contracts totaling $11 million from organizations like DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and other Department of Defense customers. It is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being used by the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division during its regular training cycle at Fort Hood in Texas, with the expectation that the unit will bring along products that prove themselves when it next deploys in 2027.
For Scout’s internal testing, the rubber meets the dirt in the base’s hilly terrain, where the company’s operations team, led by former soldiers, is putting the vehicles through their paces on simulated missions.
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