"Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: turn mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes. The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer whose teams located insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intel. The idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation, he told TechCrunch."
"As he explains it, war plans aren't just for large-scale conflicts, what one might think of as "war games." Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparation to flight missions. Mearn saw the status quo firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team built plans the same way much of the military still does today: by assembling maps, diagrams, tables, and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then sending them up the chain for review."
Pytho AI aims to reduce mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes for the Department of Defense. Michael Mearn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer, founded the company after observing planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation. Current planning workflows assemble maps, diagrams, tables, and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and produce more than 150 artifacts. A team of five can spend roughly 12,000 minutes over five days on one plan, with about 70% of that time devoted to data management instead of strategy. Plans often go stale and remain unupdated or un-compared, leaving readiness gaps. Mearn attended Harvard Business School, worked on Facebook's misinformation team during the 2018 midterms, led product at startups, and founded Pytho with CTO Shah Hossain in summer 2023; the company is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Read at TechCrunch
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