El Segundo's Smack Tech Raises $32M
Smack Technologies, an AI startup in nearby El Segundo, just secured $32 million in Series A funding. The round is aimed at advancing the company's AI tools for national security applications, continuing the trend of major investor interest in LA's defense-tech AI ecosystem.
The Series A funding was led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, with notable participation from Point72 Ventures, Felicis, and Bloomberg Beta, among others. Point72 Ventures also led the company's initial seed round. Smack Technologies was co-founded in 2024 by Andrew Markoff and Clint Alanis, two MARSOC veterans with over twenty years of combined combat experience. Their stated goal is to build a frontier AI lab for national security to provide "Decision Dominance" to the U.S. Department of War. The company is developing domain-specific AI models using deep reinforcement learning, trained in proprietary synthetic warfare environments. This approach is intended to address gaps left by Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes conflict scenarios. Smack's product suites, named Omega and Alpha, are designed to break down decision-making silos. The Omega stack handles command-level planning, while the Alpha platform deploys lightweight AI agents on tactical edge hardware. The technology aims to shorten military decision-making loops from days down to seconds. The startup has already secured contracts with several branches of the U.S. armed forces, including the Joint Fires Network (JFN) and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL). This funding round is part of a larger trend of accelerating investment in defense AI. In 2025, venture capital deals in defense technology reached a record $49.1 billion, a significant jump from $27.2 billion the previous year. Venture capital has poured nearly $130 billion into the defense tech sector since 2021.
