Scout AI, a robotics and artificial intelligence company, has emerged from stealth with the announcement of a $15 million seed funding round and the launch of its foundation model, Fury, for defense applications. The Sunnyvale-based startup also disclosed that it has secured two contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The seed round was led by Align Ventures and Booz Allen Ventures, with participation from a range of investors including Draper Associates, Decisive Point Ventures, Perot Jain, and others.
Founded in August 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis, Scout AI aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems for autonomous defense robotics. Adcock, the company’s CEO, previously worked in private equity and serves on the board of Figure AI. CTO Collin Otis has a background in AI and robotics, having held roles at Kodiak Robotics and Uber ATG.
The company’s core product, Fury, is described as a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed for deployment across multiple domains, including land, air, sea, and space. According to the company, Fury enables uncrewed systems to interpret visual and language inputs and execute physical commands autonomously, even in environments without communication or GPS access.
Scout’s initial prototypes — the G01 unmanned ground vehicle and the A01 unmanned aerial vehicle — are currently undergoing autonomous testing at the company’s proving grounds in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The company stated that Fury is modular and hardware-agnostic, capable of running on standard commercial components, which allows it to be integrated into various robotic platforms without major hardware changes. Scout is actively forming partnerships to deploy its AI system across existing and new defense technologies.
Scout AI is based in Silicon Valley and is in the process of expanding its engineering team to support further development and deployment of its defense AI systems.
