Exclusive: Silicon Valley startup breaks cover with plans for robo-armies
Scout AI co-founders Colby Adcock and Collin Otis want to, in their words, make large robotic armies a reality for the good guys.
"There's a very big white space for somebody to be the AGI brain for defense robots," Adcock told Axios in a recent conversation.
Why it matters: Scout AI emerged from stealth today with $15 million in funding and Pentagon commitments in its back pocket. It also unveiled a ground vehicle (G01) and aerial drone (A01) fueled by Fury, its marquee product, a vision-language-action foundation model.
State of play: The seven-person company was founded in August. It's based in Sunnyvale, California, where it hopes to siphon top tech talent.
It has 20,000 square feet of research and development space, plus hundreds of acres for real-world testing in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
It's backed by Align Ventures, Booz Allen Ventures, Draper Associates and more.
"Our intent would be to put our technology, Fury, in every robotic asset that the U.S. military has, and turn them into intelligent, autonomous agents," Adcock said. That's across air, land, sea and space, he emphasized.
Partnering with other companies is "a big piece" of the strategy.
The intrigue: Adcock is a board member at his brother's company, Figure AI, which is building humanoid robots. Otis was a founding engineer and director of autonomy and AI at Kodiak Robotics, another player in the autonomy space.
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