By Raj Shah
Often, the most consequential decisions in national security are made with incomplete information, under severe time pressure, and with enormous stakes riding on the outcome. That is the problem Watchtower Labs was built to solve.
Today, Watchtower emerged from stealth with $30 million in seed financing led by Shield Capital and Conviction, with participation from Founders Fund. This one is personal. Watchtower was incubated inside Shield Capital. I’ve worked alongside the team from the earliest days and am honored to serve as Chairman. We started with a straightforward question: what becomes possible when you build AI from the ground up for military decision-making — not as an afterthought, but as the founding premise?
The answer is Watchtower.
From Information Advantage to Decision Advantage
For decades, the U.S. military invested heavily in collecting more: more sensors, more intelligence, more data, more connectivity. The results speak for themselves. But information alone doesn’t create advantage. Someone still has to determine what it means, understand the constraints, evaluate courses of action, anticipate second-order effects, and recommend a path forward — all before the window closes.
In complex operations, that work is brutal.
Consider logistics. A plan may depend on the availability of aircraft, ships, fuel, spare parts, munitions, routes, personnel, and time. Change one assumption and the implications cascade across an entire operation. Modern military planning runs on constraint, and staff have historically managed that complexity through painstaking analysis, specialized tools, spreadsheets, and judgment built over careers. They may evaluate a handful of options before a decision has to be made. When circumstances change, the process starts over.
Watchtower changes that equation. It can model hundreds of possible futures against the constraints that actually bind a force — helping planners understand not just what they can do, but the tradeoffs and consequences of each choice. The goal isn’t to remove the human from the decision. It’s the opposite: give commanders a far richer picture of their options while there’s still time to act.
Technology Alone Doesn’t Solve This
The best national security companies understand both sides: what frontier technology makes possible, and how the mission actually works. That’s what immediately set this team apart.
Akhil Iyer is a former Marine special operations officer who later joined us at Shield Capital as an investor. He’s seen firsthand how consequential decisions get made in operational environments — and where existing tools fall short. His co-founders, Souren Aghajanyan and John Morman, are seasoned Microsoft engineers who built large-scale distributed systems. That combination is rare and quite powerful. Watchtower brings together people who’ve lived the operational problem with engineers capable of building at extraordinary scale.
They’re not taking a commercial AI product and bolting on a defense wrapper. They’re building an AI-native company around the mission from day one.
Planning is fundamental to military operations. Watchtower partnered with the Naval Postgraduate School in 2025 to ground its approach in operations research. In January 2026, the Defense Innovation Unit selected the company under the Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program. The technology starts with sustainment and logistics. The opportunity is considerably broader.
Why Now
AI capabilities are advancing faster than most institutions can absorb them — at the same moment that the geopolitical environment is placing greater demands on the U.S. and its allies. At Shield Capital, we’ve believed since our founding that the technologies defining the next generation of commercial innovation will have profound implications for national security. AI is the clearest proof point yet.
But applying AI to national security requires more than access to a model. It requires proprietary workflows, mission understanding, trusted data, rigorous engineering, and deep integration with the people executing the mission. That’s where enduring companies get built.
Watchtower is exactly what we look for: frontier technology applied to a consequential national security problem, by a team with the technical depth and mission credibility to solve it.
In this case, we had the chance to be on the journey from the beginning.
That’s why we built Watchtower: to help military leaders see further into the future, understand more of their available choices, and give commanders greater freedom of action when it matters most.