![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Scout_Still_8.jpg\")
An autonomous ground vehicle controlled by Scout AI\u2019s Fury model. Image Credits:Scout AI<\/p>\nAt a U.S. military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: It\u2019s an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis that calls itself a \u201cfrontier lab for defense.\u201d The company said on Wednesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its $15 million seed round in January 2025.<\/p>\n
Scout invited TechCrunch for an exclusive tour of its training operations at a military base it asked us not to name.<\/p>\n
The company is building an AI model it calls \u201cFury\u201d to operate and command military assets, first for logistical support and then, soon, for autonomous weapons. CTO Collin Otis compares this work, which builds on existing large language models (LLMs), to training soldiers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c[Soldiers] start when they\u2019re 18 years old, and sometimes they even start after college, so you want to start with that base level of intelligence,\u201d Otis told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s useful to start with someone who\u2019s already made an investment and then say, \u2018Hey, what do I have to do to teach this thing to be an incredible military AGI, versus just being a broadly intelligent AGI?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Scout has secured military technology development contracts totaling $11 million from organizations like DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and other Department of Defense customers. It is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being used by the U.S. Army\u2019s 1st Cavalry Division during its regular training cycle at Fort Hood in Texas, with the expectation that the unit will bring along products that prove themselves when it next deploys in 2027.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Scout\u2019s internal testing, the rubber meets the dirt in the base\u2019s hilly terrain, where the company\u2019s operations team, led by former soldiers, is putting the vehicles through their paces on simulated missions.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Autonomous cars are starting to be seen in more cities around the world, but they operate in more structured environments with rules.\u00a0Operating autonomously on unmarked trails or off-road is another challenge entirely. Otis, who previously worked at autonomous trucking company Kodiak, said he was motivated to start Scout when he realized the system he helped build there wasn\u2019t intelligent enough to operate in an unpredictable war zone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An autonomous ground vehicle controlled by Scout AI\u2019s Fury model. Image Credits:Scout AI<\/p>\n
A new approach to autonomy<\/p>\n
Scout is turning to a newer autonomy technology: Vision Language Action models, or VLAs, that are based on LLMs and used to control robots. First released by Google DeepMind in 2023, the technology seeded robotics startups like Physical Intelligence<\/a> and Figure AI, the humanoid robot company led by Adcock\u2019s brother, Brett.\u00a0<\/p>\n Colby Adcock is on Figure\u2019s board, and he says that experience convinced him of the opportunity to bring broader intelligence to the military\u2019s growing fleet of autonomous vehicles. His brother introduced him to Otis, who was advising Figure, and they set about applying the latest in AI to military solutions.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I handed you the controller of a drone right now and I strapped a headset on you, you could learn to fly that thing in minutes,\u201d Otis said. \u201cYou\u2019re actually just learning how to connect your prior knowledge to these couple little joysticks. It\u2019s not a big leap. That\u2019s the way to think about VLAs and why they\u2019re such an unlock.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, I got a chance to drive one of Scout\u2019s ATVs around the rutty trails, and the terrain was challenging: steep hills, loose sand on turns, disappearing tracks, confusing intersections. I\u2019m not an experienced ATV driver but made a fair go on my first attempt (if I say so myself). That\u2019s the kind of general intelligence the company wants in its models, which it has been training using these ATVs for just six weeks \u2014 it started off using civilian ATVs.\u00a0<\/p>\n I also rode in the ATV under autonomous control and could feel the difference \u2014 it accelerates faster than a human who might be thinking about a passenger\u2019s comfort. The operations team pointed out how the vehicles hug the right on wider trails but stay in the middle on narrow ones, like their training drivers. They also, when confused, suddenly slow down to think over their next move, which happened a few times as the ATV carried us on a 6.5 km loop before returning to base.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though the VLAs are new enough that they are yet to be deployed by any company in an operational setting, \u201cthe technology is good enough to be doing that experimentation in the field with soldiers to figure out how to most be effective to U.S. forces,\u201d said Stuart Young, a former DARPA program manager who worked on ground vehicle autonomy. And like other autonomy companies, Scout\u2019s full stack also includes deterministic systems and other flavors of AI to round out its agents\u2019 capabilities.<\/p>\n Young left DARPA this month to join Field after managing a program called RACER<\/a> that asked companies to create high-speed, autonomous off-road vehicles, helping seed this space<\/a> the same way that the organization\u2019s Grand Challenge boosted self-driving cars. Two competitors in this space, Field AI and Overland AI, were spun out of that program, and Scout also participated later.<\/p>\n The first applications of ground autonomy, according to Scout executives and military technologists, will be automated resupply: Carrying water or ammunition to distant observation posts, or in a convoy where a crewed truck might be followed by six to 10 autonomous vehicles, saving precious human labor for more important tasks.<\/p>\n Brian Mathwich, an active duty infantry officer doing a stint as a military fellow at Scout, recalled a recent exercise in Alaska where he led a resupply convoy in total darkness and wished for autonomous vehicles to help him out.<\/p>\n Adding intelligence to the Army\u2019s motor pool<\/p>\n Scout sees itself primarily as a software company building an intelligence layer for military machines. It doesn\u2019t intend to make the autonomous vehicles themselves, but instead build atop them.<\/p>\n Adcock expects the startup\u2019s first product to be widely adopted will be one called \u201cOx,\u201d a command and control software bundled with hardened computer hardware like GPUs, communications, and cameras. It\u2019s intended to allow individual soldiers to orchestrate multiple drones and autonomous ground vehicles using prompts such as, \u201cGo to this waypoint and watch for enemy forces.\u201d<\/p>\n However, making that software work requires training on real vehicles, which is why it has set up Foundry, its training range at the military base. There, drivers spend eight-hour shifts putting the ATVs through their paces, then work through a reinforcement learning system to log where they had to take over, which is used to improve the model. The base commander has even asked the company\u2019s ATV to take a turn with security patrols.<\/p>\n One hypothesis Scout is testing is that VLAs will enable this relatively limited dataset, alongside training data in simulations, to deliver a fully capable driving agent. While the vehicle seems comfortable on trails, for example, it isn\u2019t ready to operate fully off-road.<\/p>\n Scout is also practicing with drones for reconnaissance and defense, giving them intelligence with vision language models.<\/p>\n The startup is working on a system that would see groups of munition drones fly with a larger \u201cquarterback\u201d platform that provides more compute resources to command them. For example, the drones could search a geographic area for hidden enemy tanks and attack them, possibly without human intervention. Otis contends that the alternative approach in such a scenario might be indirect artillery fire, which is imprecise compared to drone strikes.<\/p>\n While autonomous weapons are a flash point in the politics of defense tech, experts note the concept is old: Heat-seeking missiles and mines have been used in warfare for decades.\u00a0The question for technologists is how the weapons are controlled, according to Jay Adams, a retired U.S. Army captain who leads Scout\u2019s operations team.<\/p>\n Adams notes the company\u2019s munitions drones can be programmed to only attack threats in a specific geographic area, or only following human confirmation. He also says autonomous weapons platforms are unlikely to fire because they are scared, the way an 18-year-old soldier might be.\u00a0<\/p>\n VLAs, too, hold promise for improving targeting. Scout says its models are pretrained on a specific set of military data to prepare them for, say, running into an enemy tank while on a resupply mission. Lt. Col. Nick Rinaldi, who supervises Scout\u2019s work for the Army Applications Laboratory, says that while automated targeting is hard and unlikely to be used outside of constrained environments in the near term, the potential of VLAs to reason about threats make them a promising technology to investigate.<\/p>\n Adams says the promise of drones that can identify their own targets is key to warfare in the future. While Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine has generated intense interest in drone warfare, he believes that humans operating individual UAVs doesn\u2019t scale well enough for the U.S. to face a large number of low-cost unmanned systems should they threaten U.S. forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n A mission to counter anti-military vibes<\/p>\n Like many defense startups, Scout wears its mission on its sleeve, and its executives will freely criticize companies that are reluctant to hand their technology over to the government. Google, for example, reportedly<\/a> pulled out of a Pentagon contest to develop control systems for autonomous drone swarms, a capability Scout is also working on.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Orchestrator-UI-3.png\")
Image Credits:Scout AI<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Scout_Still_15.jpg\")
Image Credits:Scout AI<\/p>\n