Ex-Marine’s Startup Aims to Revolutionize U.S. Military Mission Planning with AI

WASHINGTON / SAN FRANCISCO – October 2025 — A new defense startup is emerging from stealth with a bold promise to the U.S. Department of Defense: turn mission planning that currently takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes.

Founded by former Marine human-intelligence officer Michael Mearn, Pytho AI aims to revolutionize how military operations are prepared, analyzed, and executed. The company is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, signaling growing attention from both the defense and tech communities.

Mearn, who served in Afghanistan leading teams tasked with locating insurgents, IEDs, and weapons caches, said the idea for Pytho AI came from watching planners struggle with outdated tools. “It’s too slow for how fast the battlefield now moves,” he told TechCrunch.

Even in 2025, mission planning across much of the U.S. military still involves assembling maps, diagrams, and tables in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, which are then manually reviewed up the chain of command. Mearn estimates that one mission plan can require over 12,000 minutes of labor by a small team—yet 70% of that time is spent on data management, not actual strategy.

Worse, those plans often go stale before they’re even executed. “There is a plan that exists that we’re supposed to be constantly updating based on new information and ready to enact at any time. That should be dynamic. Is it in reality?” Mearn asked rhetorically, pointing to current Indo-Pacific scenarios as an example.

After leaving the Marines, Mearn earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and joined Facebook’s misinformation team during the 2018 U.S. midterms before leading product at several Silicon Valley startups. Together with CTO Shah Hossain, he founded Pytho in 2023 after hearing repeatedly from active-duty personnel that mission planning remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in military operations.

Pytho AI’s team of four—split between Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—is building an AI-driven platform designed to be used by everyone from young enlisted planners to two-star generals.

Unlike chatbot-style tools, Pytho’s software uses a template-based system powered by AI agents that can rapidly generate complete, editable mission plans in any format. Its first demo focuses on mission analysis, traditionally a 48-step process, which Pytho’s software reduces to just minutes.

Humans remain central to the process: the AI drafts the plan, and planners can then review, adjust, and finalize. The platform also includes confidence scores to gauge data reliability and integrates directly with Microsoft products for compatibility with current military workflows.

Despite the startup’s small size, its ambitions are anything but modest. Pytho claims to be already working with “almost every single service,” embedding engineers directly with military units to co-develop workflow solutions.

“Service members out there need people that are dedicated solely to building these plans,” Mearn said. “It would almost be a disservice not to have a company focused entirely on this mission.”

As defense agencies worldwide race to adopt AI for operational planning and decision support, Pytho AI’s timing—and battlefield credibility—could make it one of the most closely watched entrants in the growing defense-tech sector.

Source: Techcrunch