Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense. The company aims to 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 intelligence. The idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation.
As he explains it, war plans are not just for large-scale conflicts. 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. He stated that the current process is too slow for how fast the battlefield now moves.
There can be more than 150 products and artifacts created during the planning process. A team of five could spend roughly 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on one plan. About 70 percent of that time goes into data management rather than strategy. Even worse, plans go stale quickly. Time and resource constraints often mean missions are not updated or compared against alternatives.
Mearn used a conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. He mentioned that a plan exists which is supposed to be constantly updated based on new information and ready to enact at any time. That plan should be dynamic, but he questions if it is in reality.
After leaving the Marines, Mearn went to Harvard Business School before moving to Silicon Valley. There he worked on Facebook’s misinformation team during the 2018 midterms. He later led product at a handful of startups. He and CTO Shah Hossain founded Pytho in the summer of 2023 after talking with people still serving in the military and hearing that mission planning remained a major pain point.
The startup is only four people, split between Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Its ambition is to change mission planning for every service member in the armed forces through a streamlined software product. Rather than a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure that is well understood by service members today. This is powered by a system of AI agents to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo centers on Mission Analysis. This is a process with 48 steps that are generally time-intensive but now take mere minutes to complete. Humans stay in the loop, and after generating the draft, Pytho’s software invites planners to edit where needed. The company included features like confidence scores to contextualize the information, and the software can integrate with Microsoft products to align with existing workflows.
Mearn emphasized that they are building the product to ensure a range of end users can access it. This includes 18-year-old specialists fresh out of high school to two-star generals with decades of service behind them.
Breaking into the Department of Defense is notoriously challenging. Pytho claims it already has work with almost every single service by embedding company engineers with units to co-build planning workflows. Mearn said that service members need people dedicated solely to building these plans. He added that it would almost be a disservice to not have a company dedicated to this.
Pytho AI is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.