Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: 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 intel. The idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation, he told TechCrunch. Pytho AI is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
As he explains it, war plans aren’t just for large-scale conflicts, what one might think of as “war games.” 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 send them up the chain for review.
“It’s too slow for how fast the battlefield now moves,” 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 go stale quickly, and time and resource constraints often mean mission aren’t updated or compared against alternatives.
Mearn used a conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. “There is a plan that exists that we’re supposed to be constantly updating based off new information and ready to enact at any time. That should be dynamic. Is it in reality?”
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After leaving the Marines, Mearn went to Harvard Business School before going to Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s misinformation team during the 2018 midterms. He later lead 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. But its ambitions are 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’s well understood by service members today, powered by a system of AI agents to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo centers on Mission Analysis, 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, whether that be 18-year-old specialists fresh out of high school to two-star generals with decades of service behind them.
Of course, 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.
“Service members out there need people that are dedicated solely to building these plans,” he said. “It would almost be a disservice to not have a company dedicated to this.”
If you want to learn from Pytho AI firsthand, and see dozens of additional pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make the connections that drive business results, head here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, this week in San Francisco.
