Rune Technologies raises $24M Series A to modernize military logistics with AI-driven software TyrOS

stream. How you doing? Hey, how are you? What's up? I'm good. Welcome to the stream. Uh, thank you. G give us a brief intro, give us an update, and tell us the news. Yeah. Yeah. So, Dave Tuttle, co-founder, CEO of Rune Technologies.

uh founded the company last year with my co-founder Peter who I know was on a little while ago. Uh we just raised our series A just announced it about two weeks ago. Uh so excited to have uh closed that. Didn't even give you the number. Sorry. Sorry. Didn't even get to the number. We didn't even get to the number.

But congratulations on the series A. Uh G give us the number. Give us who led and then we'll go into more about what the company's building. Yes. Yes, we closed $24 million led by human capital.

Um, all of our current investors from Andre and 72 and XYZ reinvested and then you know new investors human and uh, you know, Washington Harbor partners as well, new investor here and and uh, we won't announce it yet. There's going to be another one uh, but we'll save that in a few weeks as a little surprise. Fantastic.

Uh, you're give us give us the brief history on uh, on logistics and supply chains in the US military. Um what I mean what what were we using in World War II? What are we using today? And then what does the future look like? Yeah. And I mean in many ways the insane part is some of it hasn't changed, right?

Like we're tracking things in analog systems.

you know the the means of a whiteboard has changed obviously from uh from scratch paper back in the day and you know sometimes it's even Excel documents but great like the basic nature of it is still an analog human centric tracking of things whether that's supply inventory levels vehicle maintenance levels vehicle locations and those sorts of things you know and especially over the last you know I came out of uniform I'm still serving part-time even in the army national guard and when I think about like how do we track what we need and where we need it and when we need it that is still a humanentric analog process has remained generally unchanged at least in the last 20 years with the advent of you know computers at some level and connectivity at some level.

So yeah um what's the path to actually getting this this in the hands of the war fighter? Obviously it's a newer company. You've made a lot of progress but um it's never easy getting to program record. It's never easy getting uh you know full deployment. We've we've talked about the history of Palunteer.

Took a long time to get that out into the world. Uh what's the plan? What's the update? Yeah. Yeah, I mean you said it. I mean it is a long path. We know that we all of us have come from this industry. We've lived in the defense space for years at Rune, you know, from many other companies.

Um I'm excited to say right now like there's a team down at an army base as we speak deploying Turos at an exercise with an Army Corps. Um so pretty excited about that. That'll be our second deployment within the Army. Um we haven't announced it yet, but we also have work within the Marine Corps as well. Yeah.

So we know we got to spin the flywheel with these types of things and core to our DNA is how do we get out to these exercises in real world scenarios with war fighters with our sustainer you know sustainment customers and do this and that you know build closely with the war fighters in many ways what what Palanteer pioneered and what Andrew pioneered right how do we do this with them to then build momentum get those get ahead of the requirements do things very quickly and iteratively to then get to that goal of write an enterprise you know or production deployment in those types of situations.

Um so you know I think you you guys well know that you know seed round is about hey do we have product market fit is the thing that we're building needed right we have proven that and what we thought was going to take 12 to 18 months it we did it in 8 months with initial pilot contracts in the military and now series A is about how do we scale the team and how do we ruthlessly execute on the things we need to do right to meet the milestones we have to actually deploy this across the not just the joint force but even potentially our allies as well.

How much uh you know we in the the recent conflict in the Middle East, how much are you trying to learn and and how much are you guys paying attention to uh the challenges they're facing there versus hey we already know our systems and processes are so broken that we just need to bring them and and and so um you know ancient uh I'm sure uh you know we just need to bring them into the present and then and then worry about kind of more specific deployment ments and and problems.

Yeah. Well, I mean everything's a learning opportunity, right? So whether we're talking about the Russia Ukraine war and how how the speed and the scale of sustainment that has to happen in in a peer or near peer adversary or we're even looking at the recent events in the Middle East, right?

There was a not insignificant consumption or expenditure of US surfaceto-air missiles even in the 12 days of conflict in in Sentcom, right?

So how do we think through knowing those expenditures in real time or near real time being able to even predict those now with those cons, you know, expenditures into future needs and being able to position things and reposition things, inventories, right? In this case, munitions in the right place.

To me, those are all important lessons learned, right? We have to be able to do it at the scale that is going to be required and at machine speed.

And then we have to take a real hard look at like what are the exquisite things that are very low density that we need to get like exquisite munitions and systems that are going to be required um you know in a conflict should a conflict come hopefully not but should it come and I think you know Peter and I founded this company in many ways because I don't question that we're not going to have the most exquisite munitions the best weapon systems in the world what keeps me up at night is like can we get them in the place we need them at the scale we need them at the right time right can we actually do that like that's something that I think is lacking and frankly has been overlooked by the technology you know companies of today right and how do we sustain the force and how do we do this with modern technology yeah yeah that's the entire conversation um just uh yeah uh capacity more than capability so uh thank you for everything that you're doing and thanks for joining the stream to the team too tremendous progress love uh love to see you guys making 18 months of progress in eight months we love to see keep the future Yeah.

Awesome. Uh, welcome back on the stream anytime. We'll talk to you soon and have a great day. Talk soon. Thanks, John. See you later. Up next, we have Will Ahmed from Whoop coming in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Second time on the show.