Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) today announced that its corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, LLC, has made a strategic investment in Scout AI to modernize legacy robotic systems and prepare for a new era of autonomous warfare.
Aligned with Department of Defense (DOD) priorities and needs, Scout AI delivers a physical AI system powered by FURY—a defense-specific Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model engineered to transform unmanned systems and robotics into intelligent, autonomous agents. By integrating advanced AI into defense robotics, Scout AI brings reasoning and control to a wide spectrum of uncrewed systems across ground and air warfighting domains, with an aim to quickly expand capabilities into maritime and space. This innovation will not only power new autonomous solutions for DOD but also modernize many existing systems to ensure the U.S. military can make fast, more accurate decisions in any environment.
“As a strategic investor, Booz Allen is hyper-focused on fast-tracking results through private sector innovation and bringing capabilities that will disrupt the federal technology market,” said Randy Yamada, Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton. “Scout AI’s technology will play a pivotal role in outpacing emerging threats with the realization of uncrewed systems, specifically in communications-constrained environments.”
Scout AI’s unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) leverage an advanced autonomy architecture that allows warfighters to command them using simple human language prompts. The models that Scout AI is building will enable a new era of better human-machine teaming with significant cost savings.
“Our goal is to enable robotic mass for the U.S. military through intelligent AI and cost-effective, high-rate manufactured hardware,” said Colby Adcock, CEO of Scout AI. “By combining our cutting-edge VLA system with Booz Allen’s deep expertise in AI and defense, we are paving the way for a new generation of intelligent systems that will enable more effective, adaptable, and real-time decision-making in complex environments.”
The investment follows critical efforts by Booz Allen to speed defense tech development, enable cost savings, and modernize systems necessary to achieve U.S. strategic advantage. Booz Allen recently made its largest strategic investment to date in Shield AI’s F-1 strategic funding round, designed to help expand the deployment of Hivemind Enterprise and empower the industrial base to build more autonomy products, in addition to collaborating with Carnegie Robotics on co-development efforts.
“Scout AI’s ambitious team has a giant vision—develop and deploy physical AI for defense applications. Leveraging vision-language-action (VLA) models, Scout AI’s approach to autonomy enables versatile robotic systems that better handle the long tail of edge cases present on the battlefield while also offering a more human-centric user experience for robotic control. Service members can use text and voice prompts to command and collaborate with their robotic teammates,” said James Gadea, Booz Allen Ventures. “We invested in Scout AI’s seed round because we believe physical AI is a force multiplier for the DOD and is harkening the future of human-machine teaming.”
Since its launch, Booz Allen’s $100 million corporate venture capital arm has made strategic investments in early-stage companies developing dual-use commercial technologies. Scout AI marks the 14th Ventures investment, with a diversified portfolio that includes Albedo, Credo AI, Hidden Layer, Hidden Level, Latent AI, Quindar, RAIC Labs (formerly Synthetaic), Reality Defender, Reveal Technology, Second Front (2F), SEEQC, and Starfish Space.
Read more about Booz Allen Ventures and how the firm is fast-tracking defense mission outcomes with AI.
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