Noda AI, Smack Technologies detail their Series A capital rounds
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By
Ross Wilkers
Autonomous system management and frontier artificial intelligence are the key tech areas of focus here.
Noda AI
This developer of orchestration software to manage multiple autonomous systems at a time has fetched $25 million in Series A capital amid its push to meet key delivery milestones.
Noda AI opened for business in 2024 to design an open architecture-based reasoning platform that can integrate different vehicles and other autonomous capabilities into its ecosystem. The idea is to provide operators a chessboard-like setup for managing these mixed fleets and their effects across multiple domains of conflict.
Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series A round that also involved Booz Allen Hamilton’s venture capital arm for investing in startups and other young tech companies.
Noda AI is also partnering with Booz Allen and HII on development acceleration efforts, including work to ramp up the software platform’s integration with 30 different original equipment makers.
Noda AI is led by CEO Philong Duong, who founded the company alongside fellow former Marine Corps instructor Dave Corbett.
Other participants in the round included Alumni Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Draper Associates. Bloomberg Beta is an early stage VC investment arm of the global financial data and media giant.
Smack Technologies
This frontier artificial intelligence company focused on national security has collected $32 million in seed and Series A capital to push forward on building new domain-specific AI models.
Frontier AI refers to foundation-level models such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude that are general-purpose in nature and scalable.
Smack Technologies opened for business in 2024 to bring this approach to defense environments, including via the use of deep reinforcement learning techniques that those three models rely on.
Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures led the Series A round. Other participants included Point72 Ventures, Felicis, First In, Scribble Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Washington Harbour Partners, Palumni VC, Fulcrum Venture Group, Anomaly Fund, and Fortitude Ventures.
Smack was co-founded by a pair of Marine Corps veterans in Andrew Markoff and Clint Alanis, who also started the company with the goal of helping operators rapidly scale fleets of autonomous decisions and analyze large amounts of sensor data in real time.
The company refers to its product suites as Omega and Alpha, which a bulk of the new funding will go toward in terms of research-and-development. Smack is also using a portion of the capital to grow its technical team.