Scout AI raises $100M for unmanned systems autonomy

Scout AI has raised $100 million in Series A funding to develop Fury, a foundation model for unmanned warfare that coordinates autonomous systems across air, land, sea and space.

The Sunnyvale company said the round was co-led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, with participation from Decisive Point, Booz Allen Ventures, BVVC, Neman Ventures, Evolution VC Partners, Heraclitus Capital Management, Sigmas Group, Disruptive Founders Fund and Vaughn Capital Partners. Scout said the financing will scale Fury, its model family for unmanned systems, multi-agent collaboration and tactical-edge autonomy.

The Company

Scout AI was founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis. The company describes itself as a frontier AI lab for defence, focused on the reasoning layer between commander intent, command-and-control systems and heterogeneous unmanned platforms. Its work sits above the vehicle layer, aiming to coordinate existing robotic systems rather than manufacture a single drone, ground vehicle or maritime platform.

Defence robotics is filling with hardware companies building aircraft, ground vehicles, loitering systems and payloads. Scout is building a software and model layer meant to make mixed fleets act together, especially where GPS, communications and cloud connectivity are limited. They describe the stack as real-time edge autonomy for comms-denied and GPS-denied environments, with platform-agnostic deployment across robotic form factors.

The Model Layer

Fury is Scout’s foundation model family for unmanned systems. The company says it can translate high-level mission intent into coordinated autonomous action, tasking mixed fleets across unmanned ground vehicles, drones and other robotic platforms. Scout’s public materials describe Fury as using real-world imitation data and simulated environments, with low-power inference and lightweight sensor configurations.

In February 2026, Scout publicly showed Fury Autonomous Vehicle Orchestrator running a heterogeneous fleet of air and ground systems from natural language mission intent. The demo used a ground vehicle and multiple aerial systems in Central California, with Fury building a mission plan, submitting it for human approval, tasking each asset and adjusting the plan as conditions changed. Scout said the demo was executed on real hardware without scripted control, CGI or manual operation.

The technical claim should be kept narrow. Scout is not claiming a new robot body. It is claiming an interoperability and autonomy layer that can read platform documentation and tool definitions, then produce structured instructions for each vehicle’s API without modifying the underlying flight controller, mobility stack or autonomy software.

The Army Route

Scout’s public progress is tied to U.S. defence evaluation rather than commercial robotics deployment. In December 2025, it was selected as a winner of the U.S. Army’s xTechOverwatch competition. At the Army Human Machine Integration Summit, the company demonstrated Fury on Hendrick Motorsports Technical Solutions’ NOMAD unmanned ground vehicle, describing the system as camera-only and based on an end-to-end learned vision-language-action model for navigation, ISR and coordinated multi-robot manoeuvres.

The company also disclosed $11 million in contracts with U.S. defence organisations, including DARPA, Army Applications Laboratory and other Department of Defense customers. TechCrunch reported that Scout’s autonomous military ATVs were being trained at a U.S. military base in Central California, with field testing focused on off-road terrain, simulated missions and autonomy in less structured environments than road vehicles normally face.

The Round

The Series A gives Scout enough capital to scale the model and operations side of the company rather than only fund demos. Scout said it had 34 employees at the time of the announcement and had already booked $11 million in defence contracts during its first year. The funding follows a $15 million seed round in January 2025.

The investor structure also fits the company’s route. Draper Associates and Align Ventures co-led the round, while Booz Allen Ventures and Decisive Point add defence-market relevance. Those names matter because Scout’s product depends on procurement access, field evaluation and integration into military workflows as much as model capability.

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