At a U.S. military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: It’s an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones. The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis that calls itself a “frontier lab for defense.” The company said on Wednesday that it has raised <head>00 million in a Series A round led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its <head>5 million seed round in January 2025. Scout invited TechCrunch for an exclusive tour of its training operations at a military base it asked us not to name. The company is building an AI model it calls “Fury” to operate and command military assets, first for logistical support and then, soon, for autonomous weapons. CTO Collin Otis compares this work, which builds on existing large language models (LLMs), to training soldiers. “[Soldiers] start when they’re 18 years old, and sometimes they even start after college, so you want to start with that base level of intelligence,” Otis told TechCrunch. “It’s useful to start with someone who’s already made an investment and then say, ‘Hey, what do I have to do to teach this thing to be an incredible military AGI, versus just being a broadly intelligent AGI?’” Scout has secured military technology development contracts totaling <head>1 million from organizations like DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and other Department of Defense customers. It is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being used by the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division during its regular training cycle at Fort Hood in Texas, with the expectation that the unit will bring along products that prove themselves when it next deploys in 2027. For Scout’s internal testing, the rubber meets the dirt in the base’s hilly terrain, where the company’s operations team, led by former soldiers, is putting the vehicles through their paces on simulated missions. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 Autonomous cars are starting to be seen in more cities around the world, but they operate in more structured environments with rules. Operating autonomously on unmarked trails or off-road is another challenge entirely. Otis, who previously worked at autonomous trucking company Kodiak, said he was motivated to start Scout when he realized the system he helped build there wasn’t intelligent enough to operate in an unpredictable war zone. An autonomous ground vehicle controlled by Scout AI’s Fury model. Image Credits:Scout AI A new approach to autonomy Scout is turning to a newer autonomy technology: Vision Language Action models, or VLAs, that are based on LLMs and used to control robots. First released by Google DeepMind in 2023, the technology seeded robotics startups like Physical Intelligence and Figure AI, the humanoid robot company led by Adcock’s brother, Brett. Colby Adcock is on Figure’s board, and he says that experience convinced him of the opportunity to bring broader intelligence to the military’s growing fleet of autonomous vehicles. His brother introduced him to Otis, who was advising Figure, and they set about applying the latest in AI to military solutions. “If I handed you the controller of a drone right now and I strapped a headset on you, you could learn to fly that thing in minutes,” Otis said. “You’re actually just learning how to connect your prior knowledge to these couple little joysticks. It’s not a big leap. That’s the way to think about VLAs and why they’re such an unlock.” Indeed, I got a chance to drive one of Scout’s ATVs around the rutty trails, and the terrain was challenging: steep hills, loose sand on turns, disappearing tracks, confusing intersections. I’m not an experienced ATV driver but made a fair go on my first attempt (if I say so myself). That’s the kind of general intelligence the company wants in its models, which it has been training using these ATVs for just six weeks — it started off using civilian ATVs. I also rode in the ATV under autonomous control and could feel the difference — it accelerates faster than a human who might be thinking about a passenger’s comfort. The operations team pointed out how the vehicles hug the right on wider trails but stay in the middle on narrow ones, like their training drivers. They also, when confused, suddenly slow down to think over their next move, which happened a few times as the ATV carried us on a 6.5 km loop before returning to base. Though the VLAs are new enough that they are yet to be deployed by any company in an operational setting, “the technology is good enough to be doing that experimentation in the field with soldiers to figure out how to most be effective to U.S. forces,” said Stuart Young, a former DARPA program manager who w
