Paris-based Comand AI, a two-year-old startup building AI battlefield strategy planning software, has raised €8.5m in seed funding led by Eurazeo. Existing investor Frst, a French seed-stage fund, and newcomer Expeditions Fund, a Poland-based VC, also participated.
The funds were raised in the course of about two months over the summer, and follow a €3m round last year from investors including Kima Ventures and Tiny VC.
Comand AI is building a software platform that military officers can use to more efficiently plan and strategise operations. “Our goal is to augment these officers so that they can plan and conduct operations […] four times faster and with four times less people,” cofounder and CEO Loïc Mougeolle tells Sifted. The company also offers a post-operation analysis tool that lets officers better train for and plan their next operation.
With the exception of Expeditions Fund, which focuses on deeptech and dual use investments, Mougeolle made the conscious decision to not pursue defence VCs. “We didn’t want investors that are pure players of the defence sector,” because “what the defence sector needs is expertise from the civil sector.” The startup has three board members: Bruno Raillard from Frst, Eurazeo’s Thomas Turelier and Alex Dewez, formerly Eurazeo and now at 20VC.
Mougeolle grew up around defence; his father worked in the French navy on projects around nuclear deterrence, and Mougeolle recalls seeing photos of ballistic missiles in his parents’ library as a child. As an adult he spent nearly 10 years at French maritime manufacturer Naval Group, where he worked on things like AI strategy.
Comand AI has opened a subsidiary in the UK and is planning expansion there. Mougeolle says it plans to spend the new money on further expanding into other NATO countries too, scaling its products, hiring senior AI talent and potential acquisitions.
Comand AI’s team is about 20, including some former OpenAI and Palantir talent. Mougeolle says he wants to more than double the team size in the next six months.
AI agents for officers
Comand AI’s software platform, called Prevail, provides AI simulations and takes data inputs from operation orders and documents from higher command, as well as real-time operations data like terrain and enemy data — letting officers deliver orders to human and robot units in the battlefield quickly. The startup trains open source models on military orders and data, which can operate in denied communications areas.
Think of it a bit like AI agents: “The core building blocks for this are AI agents that are integrated into a product that is really tailor-made for the workflow of planning military operations and conducting military operations,” says Mougeolle.
He says Comand AI has two pilot contracts — one with France and one with Germany — and has executed one contract with the French army. The startup makes money by selling licenses for annual or multi-year contracts, and has revenues of less than €1m so far, Mougeolle tells Sifted.
Competing with Palantir
In recent years the defence space has been populated with a number of fresh startups — including well-funded companies like German defence tech Helsing, which, until recently, was focused mainly on AI software.
Mougeolle sees his startup competing more with the likes of Palantir, the US-based software platform and big data analytics firm, than Helsing. He says that instead of focusing on incorporating AI into things like robots — i.e. more specific use cases — Comand AI is focused on “the scale of an entire region, like Ukraine” with its software platform. As an example, he says Comand AI might be used to plan a whole mission, which could include robot units provided by Helsing. “What we do is to distribute the [command] order to all the subunits […] so we are more in competition with maybe a large scale platform like Palantir, or with incumbents.”
But hiring the right talent in defence tech is tricky, and it’s difficult to compete with the budgets of Big Tech for key roles like engineers. In defence, you need “not only a team that will be better than any other defence player; you need a team that is better than any tech company,” says Mougeolle.
He points out the recent partnership between Anduril and OpenAI as a catalyst for Europe to step up its game: “This is the type of competition we will have in Europe, and this should set the bar on the quality of the products the military needs to have, and also set the bar in terms of recruitment.”
That means luring more talent from OpenAI and Palantir.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/comand-ai-fundraise-battlefield-software-news/
