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

WASHINGTON, Aug 17 : 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. That Anthropic fallout led to Smack holding conversations in the spring with the Marine Corps and Navy, co-founder and CEO Andy Markoff said, with both branches of the armed forces pressing the company to speed production.The urgency stems from a broad