Pentagon pressure to move AI faster drives Smack’s new funding round, CEO says

Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for the military, is raising funding to speed production of its flagship product and make wearable AI hardware designed for the battlefield.

The $61 million Series B funding round comes months after the Defense Department declared Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” in March, a rupture that sent military branches scrambling to diversify their AI vendors and turned startups like Smack ‌from afterthoughts into ⁠hot commodities.