Pytho ai It won’t come out of stealth with an ambitious pitch at the Department of Defense: Turning Mission Planning that captures warfighting into a process measured in minutes.
The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former human intelligence officer who worked on insurgency, IEDs, weapons, and other intel. The idea for the company came from watching planners throw out mission plans for a single operation, he told Techcrunch. Pytho AI is top 20 Battle Starup finalist in TechCrunch disrupts 2025See rank-.
As he explains, war planning is not limited to large-scale conflicts, what can be thought of as “war games.” Instead, service members day-to-day execute plans for everything from disaster preparedness to flight missions.
Mearn saw the status quo firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team built plans for the same military today: by assembling maps, diagrams, tables, diagrams, and then sending the chain for review.
“It’s a lot slower because of how fast the war is moving now,” he said. There can be more than 150 products and artifacts created during the planning process, and a team of five could spend roughly 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on one plan — of which, 70% goes into data management rather than strategy.
Even worse, plans are rushed, and time and resource constraints often mean that missions are not updated or compared to alternatives.
Mearn uses the conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. “There is a plan that we should keep updating new information and be ready to be active at any time. It should be dynamic. Is there dynamic. Is there reality?”
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After leaving the Marines, Mearn went to Harvard Business School before heading to Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s misinformation team during MTTERMT 2018. He then pitched products with a handful of startups. He and CTO Shah Hossain founded Pytho in the summer of 2023 after talking to people who were still serving with the military and listening to their main mission plans.
The startup is just four people, split between Washington, DC, and San Francisco. But the goal is to change mission plans for every service member in the armed forces through a streamlined software product. Instead of a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure that is well understood by service members today, with an AI AI system to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo center is a mission analysis company, a process with 48 steps that is generally intensive but now only takes a few minutes to complete.
Humans stay in the loop, and after producing a draft, Pytho software prompts designers to edit where needed. The company includes features like trust to contextualize information, and software that can integrate with Microsoft Products to sync.
Mearn stressed that they are building the product to ensure that end users can access it, whether it is an 18-year-old fresh out of high school to two years of age.
Of course, recently in the Department of Defense challenges. Pytho says it has worked with “almost every service” with the company’s engineer unit by unit to build workflows.
“Members are out. There are people who need to be supported to build the plan,” he said. “It’s almost impossible not to have a company dedicated to this.”
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