Smack Technologies: the First Frontier AI Lab for National Security

We first heard about Smack Technologies on a Thursday morning at 7 a.m. By the end of that day, I had changed my travel plans to meet face-to-face with founder & CEO, Andy Markoff. By Monday, Andy had presented to our full team. By the end of that meeting, we had agreed to invest.

That pace tells you something. But what really sealed it was a key reference call: "Andy has demonstrated leadership in ways that few people on the planet have done." 

I also called John Doyle, founder of Cape, another company in our national security portfolio, who turns out to be Andy's mentor from their Palantir days. I asked John directly: "Is Andy all that?" His answer: "Yeah, he's the real deal."

That's exactly the kind of founder we want to back. Today, I'm proud to announce Costanoa's investment in Smack Technologies, the first frontier AI lab built for national security and the company we believe will deliver Decision Dominance to the U.S. and its allies.

This investment deepens our commitment to national security alongside Vannevar Labs, Hidden Level, Auterion, Cape Tenna Systems, Muon Space, Kepler Communications and others. Smack represents the next frontier of that portfolio: not a sensor, not a domain-specific tool, but AI infrastructure that transforms how decisions get made in the field.

The Complexity Problem Is Getting Worse, Fast

Here's what's changed: today's operating environment has at least ten times as many sensors as just a decade ago. Entirely new domains have emerged as contested battlespace: autonomous drones and vehicles, electronic warfare, cyber, subsea, and space. And for the first time in a generation, the U.S. faces peer and near-peer adversaries with sophisticated capabilities across all of them, simultaneously.

This creates an information environment that moves faster than any human team can process, especially under stress and under fire. The natural instinct is to add more dashboards, more feeds, more data. But more data without better synthesis just adds noise. What commanders actually need is a faster path from sensor to decision.

The side that decides better, faster, and with more confidence shapes outcomes. This is the essential challenge of modern warfare. And it's the problem Smack was founded to solve.

Decision Dominance Is the Goal. Smack Is the Infrastructure.

Smack builds on deep reinforcement learning to do something that hasn't been possible before: integrate sensor data across domains that have historically operated in silos, reason across time and uncertainty and adversarial behavior, and deliver actionable decision support in real time. Not visualization. Not another dashboard. Decision support under pressure.

Think of it as a co-pilot for the warfighter, one that synthesizes an overwhelmingly complex picture and helps decision-makers act with confidence at superhuman speed, while keeping humans in the loop where it matters. Their dual product suites, Omega and Alpha, break down siloed decision time horizons across all three windows the military operates in: 1 to 6 months out, 1 to 4 days out, and right now.

One thing that often gets overlooked: you don't perform well under stress when you're seeing something for the first time. Smack's simulation capability lets teams rehearse scenarios across all three planning horizons before they need to act on them, so the judgment is already calibrated when it counts. Over time, this simulation layer will enable entirely new tactics and approaches, keeping pace with rapid technological change rather than chasing procurement cycles.

Why Reinforcement Learning Changes Everything

Most AI systems train on static datasets and optimize for known, stable environments. That works for many commercial applications. It breaks in adversarial, dynamic ones, which is exactly what national security demands.

Reinforcement learning is different. It lets systems learn continuously from live operations, adapt to new threats and tactics, and improve with use rather than degrade. Smack also grounds its models in the physics of the real world and calibrates them to the actual capabilities of the sensors and effectors at play, not abstract simulations. That grounding is what makes them trustworthy in mission-critical settings.

Building this right requires something rare: frontier AI capability combined with genuine military domain expertise. You can't model what you don't understand. Smack has both, which is why this is so hard to replicate.

A Team That Has Made Decisions Under Fire

Andy Markoff and Clint Alanis didn't arrive at this problem through research. They lived it. As United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) veterans with more than twenty years of combined combat experience, they made life-and-death decisions in exactly the environments Smack is built for. They know firsthand the weight of incomplete information, the cost of stovepiped systems, and the limits of human cognition under stress.

What makes them exceptional isn't just what they've been through. It's how they've processed it. They fought together, and now they build together: with the same commitment to mission, the same directness, and a genuine intellectual partnership at the intersection of reinforcement learning and national security that very few people in the world are equipped to pursue.

Andy's operating philosophy: "Sometimes you have to eat glass to do important things." This is one of those times. And this is one of those leaders.

The U.S. Cannot Afford to Fall Behind

Strategic competitors are investing heavily in AI-enabled command and control. This is the defining arms race of our era. As Andy has said directly: Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing World War III.

Commercial AI companies are doing remarkable things, but they aren’t building for the real world operating environment of national security: classified and coalition environments, physics-based modeling, adversarial dynamics, and the hard consequences of being wrong. 

The U.S. needs deeply technical, defense-native AI companies that build for real constraints, not demos. Smack is exactly that. They have already secured contracts with multiple branches of the U.S. armed forces, including the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. They aren’t theorizing, but delivering.  

Welcome to Costanoa

Andy, Clint, and the entire Smack team have committed themselves fully to ensuring the safety of the United States and its allies in a world that demands it. We are proud to partner with them.

The decision battlefield is here. Smack is making sure we decide first.