Smack Technologies raises $61M Series B

Costanoa Ventures and First In led the round, with Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Felicis, Bloomberg Beta and others participating. Total funding now exceeds $90M. Valuation was not disclosed. It is the company's second raise this year, after a seed and Series A that included a $32M Series A. The Austin company plans to spend the money on proprietary hardware for Alpha, a forearm display that shows battlefield data on the operator's arm. It will also widen the model scope of Omega, its reinforcement-learning planning product, and hire AI researchers. Headcount rose from 19 in April to 51, with about 85 targeted by year end. In July it won two prototyping contracts, from the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, together worth more than seven figures. The timing follows the Pentagon's March designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, which pushed military branches to look at smaller AI vendors. For AI founders, the round shows that procurement disruption at a large supplier can open demand for specialized vendors quickly. It also shows investors paying for domain-specific models bundled with edge hardware. The constraint is hiring: Smack's own growth plan depends on recruiting fast enough to meet demand from customers who are asking for faster delivery.