A Seattle company wants military planners to test a mission before anyone loads a truck.
Watchtower Labs emerged from stealth this week with $35M in seed money, led by Shield Capital and Conviction with Founders Fund joining. It was incubated inside Shield, and its founding team pairs Akhil Iyer, a former Marine special operations officer, with Souren Aghajanyan and John Morman, both veterans of Microsoft’s distributed systems work.
Hundreds of futures, one plan
The software models transport, spare parts, fuel, munitions and timing across hundreds of possible scenarios, then returns executable options with the assumptions and trade-offs spelled out. Planners query it in plain language; humans still decide.
The first market is sustainment, where small shifts in routes or supply can make a mission unworkable. Watchtower says conditions on the ground move faster than the spreadsheet-and-meeting process most staffs still rely on.
Traction came before the round. The company worked with the Naval Postgraduate School in 2025 on operations research and operational data, and in January the Defense Innovation Unit picked it for the Joint Sustainment Decision Tool programme serving joint and operational commands.
Defence software has become one of the more reliable funding channels for young companies, and Watchtower’s next test is whether its models hold up against real deployments rather than tabletop exercises.
