Silicon Valley is doubling its defenses as geopolitical tensions rise and desire to modernize is growing. And while many startups that have received large ratings focus on hardware and weapons, consider Anduril, Shield AI and SkyDio. RuneTechnologies wants to work on AI-enabled software for military logistics.
“The US military is currently operating on Excel spreadsheets, white boards and manual processes to run its logistics business,” co-founder David Tuttle told TechCrunch. “Logistics isn’t the sexiest part of the military. The emphasis in the tech industry is how do things get energized?
Logistics usually fall behind when it comes to innovation, Tuttle says. And he should know. Early in his career, he was an outdoor artillery in the US Army. He then served as a joint special operations headquarters before continuing to work at Andrill, where he met his co-founder, former Meta Peter Goldsborough. The two founded Rune after seeing how much the size and pace the army had to maintain its strength.
“Ukraine is a sad example of these kinds of things in ammunition spending, supply consumption, and almost peer hostile conflict. They will break human-centered and analog-centered processes,” Tuttle said.
Rune’s flagship product, Tyros, is committed to transforming manual logistics processes into an intelligent supply web that predicts future needs, optimizes current resources, and enables distributed operations, even from a disconnected laptop in the middle of the jungle.
The startup has raised a $24 million Series A round from the back of a pilot deployment under the US Army and the US Marines. The round that led to participation from PAX VC, Washington Harbor Partners, A16Z, Point72 Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital and Forward Deployed VC will be directed towards expanding Tyros’ deployment to other US military services.
Tyros has two main selling points. The first is the technical capabilities of logistics as a mission command system. Tyros relies on deep learning models, including time series models, to predict supply and demand assets such as personnel, transportation, equipment, food and other resources based on hundreds of environments and supply variables.
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“Logistics are thinking, not just, ‘What am I getting from supplies?’, but ‘What vehicle do I have to move it?’,” Tuttle said. “‘What are the qualified crew members who have to drive that car?” “What route does the vehicle overcome?” “And is it based on a threat?” “Is the bridge blown off on the routes needed to re-rout?”
Tuttle, a two-thirds of veterans, Rune’s team is working to integrate the generated AI into Tyros for a “action course,” allowing the system to digest large datasets in a real-time battle space environment, allowing logisticians and commanders to naturally querie. Additionally, while LLM is rapidly advancing, Tyros still relies on traditional mathematical optimizations of specific tasks, such as planning aircraft loads based on cubic volumes and other constraints, when accurate calculations are essential.
Tyros’ second major hook is an edge-first architecture that bypasses the need for a constant connection to a remote server. This allows the system to operate independently and synchronize when communications are reestablished. In other words, Tyros is “cloud-enabled, but does not need the cloud.”
“Building today’s software from a cloud environment perspective is very different than building software that literally runs alongside Marines and soldiers on this laptop in the jungle of the Philippines,” Tuttle said.
Tyros relies on cloud and hardware. Each tutle can run on the hardware server stack of recording programs used by the military today.
The co-founder noted that Rune’s supporters include both Palantia and Andrill executives, where they see many partnership opportunities. Rune was recently named the Palantir Startup Fellowship and announced its integration with Palantir’s Defense OSDK (Ontology Software Development Kit) earlier this year.
Automating the gap between tactical level intelligence and strategic decision-making is Rune’s long-term vision.
“I’m not just worried about keeping this for the next 30 or 60 days,” Tuttle said. “We are worried about how this will affect production decisions back to the defense industrial base. That’s the vision we want to cover. How do we drive tactical-level data to the operational level to the strategic level to the production of artillery fires?”
Clarification: Volunteer for Peter Goldsborough under cyber assistance from the US Marine Corps.
