Why We Invested In SMACK: Building an AI Frontier Lab for National Security

Modern warfare has a coordination problem: planning complex operations takes days when you have minutes. As the U.S. military prepares for the future, three capabilities matter most—rebuilding the defense industrial base, rapidly scaling autonomous systems, and leveraging AI to enable Decision Dominance. That last one is critical: the ability to ingest and process massive amounts of data in real time and act faster than your adversary.

Right now, coordinating an operation across dozens of U.S. assets and allies can take days of planning. Militaries have invested billions in autonomous systems and sensors, but there needs to be better ways to orchestrate across them in real-time. This is exactly what SMACK is solving for—SMACK is the first frontier AI lab built specifically for national security.

Co-founders Andy Markoff and Clint Alanis are U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations veterans with decades of combat experience. When we met them, what stood out was how clearly they understood the problem. Because they’d lived it. The hard part is not only building AI reasoning models, but coupling that with domain expertise and experience, and then optimizing for the communication and bandwidth constraints of a real-world conflict. And we were especially impressed that they are integrating lessons from working and training side-by-side with Japanese forces to make SMACK relevant for the Indo-Pacific theater.  

SMACK uses domain-specific models to power their Omega and Alpha core products. These systems collapse planning horizons that have been traditionally siloed. Campaign planning, operational planning, and real-time execution feed into each other instead of happening in isolation. The technology trains thousands of AI agents on physics-based battlefield simulations, then generates multi-domain plans in minutes. When the situation changes, their platform updates those plans in seconds. And it continues to work locally, staying effective when networks fail. SMACK partners with decision makers, providing timely, optimized options that will define the outcome of high-stakes operations.

At Geodesic’s Alliance Fund, we back founders building for the next era of national security. SMACK is tackling one of the hardest problems in defense: making distributed operations work at scale in contested environments. We’re proud to partner with Andy, Clint, and the entire SMACK team on this incredibly important mission.

Read SMACK’s funding announcement here: Smack Technologies Announces $32M in Funding to Build First Frontier AI Lab for National Security