“American soldiers are starting to carry artificial intelligence in their pockets and rucksacks, the result of a $98.9 million contract between the U.S. Army and a San Francisco startup.
The contract with TurbineOne reflects twin realities of the modern battlefield: Drones and AI have accelerated the speed of combat to a blistering pace, and ubiquitous signal jamming makes it difficult to send and receive data at the front lines.
TurbineOne's software runs on soldiers' laptops, smartphones and drones, eliminating the need for a steady cloud connection. The AI application equips individual soldiers with the ability to quickly identify enemy threats, such as a drone-launch site or concealed troop position, and the context needed to decide how to respond without relying on analysts sitting miles away.
A four-year-old startup still in its infancy for defense work, run by a former Navy nuclear engineer turned tech executive and venture capitalist, TurbineOne isn't the kind of company that has historically had much success winning business from the Pentagon. But a series of directives from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the armed services to buy more commercial software and shed old and expensive weapons systems in favor of drones and AI.
The Army in particular was tasked in April with transforming itself into a modern fighting force that uses fewer people and less-expensive but still lethal technology.
TurbineOne's software is part of that transformation, according to Army senior executive Andrew Evans. It hints at the military's appetite for technology from new, unproven startups that might help it prepare for future conflicts that scarcely resemble prior wars. The Army is rolling out TurbineOne to one unit at a time.
While embedded with the Army, TurbineOne made more than 200 software revisions in a week based on user feedback, said Chief Executive Ian Kalin. The TurbineOne deal marks one of the quickest paths -- just shy of four years -- for a software startup to secure a long-term contract with the Pentagon.
TurbineOne's software is part of that transformation, said to Army senior executive Andrew Evans.
TurbineOne compresses a task that might take a human 20 hours, such as sorting through images of hundreds of square miles of terrain, down to 20 seconds, Evans said.
In opting for software that processes all data on-device, the Army is taking note of a lesson from Ukraine: Conflicts will be fought in a communications blackout, without radio links and GPS, which have been rendered null by the proliferation of jammers.” [1]
1. U.S. News: Army Deploys AI For the Battlefield In Deal With Startup. Somerville, Heather. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Sep 2025: A5.
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