NODA AI, an Austin, Texas, developer of orchestration software for military autonomous systems, announced on 26 February 2026 that it had raised $25m in Series A funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round.
Booz Allen Ventures, Draper Associates, Bloomberg Beta and Alumni Ventures also took part. Pulse 2.0 reported that early investor Paige Craig of Outlander, a firm that backed the company earlier, said NODA AI had been the fastest-growing company in its portfolio. The company did not disclose a valuation in its announcement.
Washington Technology described the company as a developer of orchestration software to manage multiple autonomous systems at a time, and said the raise comes as it pushes to meet key delivery milestones.
“Mass autonomy in defense demands a new generation of algorithmic warfare – a new market category and technical approach that we are pioneering at NODA AI.”Philong Duong, Chief Executive Officer, NODA AI
What NODA AI does
NODA AI was founded in 2024 by veterans of the Global War on Terrorism. Washington Technology reported that chief executive Philong Duong founded it with fellow former Marine Corps instructor Dave Corbett.
The company says current control systems for unmanned technology are fragmented, vendor-siloed and overly deterministic, which creates operational silos and extra cognitive load for the people using them. It is building an open, vendor-agnostic reasoning platform to design, develop and deploy what it calls algorithmic warfare across manned and unmanned systems.
NODA AI describes itself as an independent cognitive layer. It works with equipment makers to integrate their vehicles and autonomous capabilities, and the company says it now has an ecosystem of more than 30 such manufacturers. It also works with government partners to develop tactics that can be run across large, mixed fleets in air, space, surface, subsurface and ground domains. Washington Technology likened the setup to a chessboard for managing mixed fleets and their effects.
Traction and partners
In the announcement, NODA AI said it had been selected over several large incumbents in key programmes, and quoted a senior Department of War official saying it had been chosen to lead development of the orchestration layer for a multi-domain collaborative autonomy programme. The company did not name the programme.
It said that in the nine months since its pre-seed funding it had built the largest technically integrated partner system in defence autonomy and won multiple awards in major defence programmes. It has partnered with Booz Allen Hamilton and Huntington Ingalls Industries to speed up development.
What the money is for
The company said the investment will let it speed up delivery on key milestones for customers in the US Department of War and the UK Ministry of Defence, deepen integration across more than 30 existing platforms and extend its technical capabilities into new defence and intelligence markets.
Janelle Teng Wade, a partner at Bessemer, said NODA AI is building the AI-native connective tissue for defence autonomy, enabling collaboration and interoperability between systems. NODA AI also said it is building a cross-platform algorithm repository so that operators can manage desired operational effects rather than individual systems.
Duong said the essence of defeating adversaries is making better, faster decisions, and that the next step is harmonising decision-making across independent autonomous systems with diverse capabilities. The company has not published headcount, revenue or earlier funding amounts beyond the pre-seed mentioned above, and no pre-seed figure was given in the sources.
Company website: nodaintelligence.ai