Seattle startup Edgerunner AI raises $12M to help military use AI — without the internet

Edgerunner AI, a Seattle-based startup building technology to help military members use generative AI, announced $12 million in a Series A round. The fresh cash comes less than a year after the company raised a $5.5 million seed round.

The tech: EdgeRunner is building domain-specific AI agents designed to help military personnel make decisions in the field.

• The company’s technology runs entirely on-device — no internet connection required — and is fine-tuned for specific military roles such as logistics and maintenance.
• EdgeRunner’s AI agents are trained on military doctrine, powered by multiple open source LLMs, and designed to reduce latency, eliminate cloud costs, and preserve data privacy.
• At the core of EdgeRunner’s approach is a technical capability to compress large models and run them efficiently on widely available hardware, such as Intel chips.

The founders: EdgeRunner CEO and co-founder Tyler Xuan Saltsman spent eight years in the Army as an officer and logistician before joining Amazon Web Services and Stability AI, where he was head of supercompute. EdgeRunner co-founder and COO Colton Malkerson was head of enterprise sales at Stability. He also worked at AWS and within the U.S. government.

The investors: Seattle-based Madrona, Four Rivers Group, HP Tech Ventures (venture arm of HP), and Alumni Ventures are among the company’s backers. Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain has joined Edgerunner’s board.

The traction: The 21-person company signed an R&D agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory and last week was designated as an “Awardable” vendor for the Department of Defense.

• It’s also working with the Rhode Island and Connecticut National Guards, and just inked a new partnership with government software firm Second Front.
• Edgerunner was also recently named to CB Insights’ AI 100 list of top AI startups and featured at Intel Vision.

The future: EdgeRunner is focused on military applications for now but hinted at a broader vision. “We’re building the J.A.R.V.I.S. to your Ironman, but we’re starting with the war fighters first, because they need it,” Xuan Saltsman told GeekWire.