Defense startup Pytho AI wants to enhance military mission planning and will showcase its technology at Disrupt 2025

Pytho AI is emerging from obscurity with an ambitious proposition for the Department of Defense: transform mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes.

The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Navy human intelligence officer whose teams found insurgents, IEDs, weapons and other intelligence. He told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building critical plans for a single operation. Pytho AI is one of the top 20 finalists in TechCrunch Disrupt 2025’s Startup Battlefield.

As he explains, war plans are not limited only to large-scale conflicts, what one might call “war games.” Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparedness to flight missions.

Mirren saw the current situation firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team constructed plans the same way many military personnel still do today: by compiling maps, charts, tables and text into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then sending them up the chain for review.

“It’s very slow compared to the speed at which the battlefield is moving now,” he said. There can be over 150 products and artifacts created during the planning process, and a team of five can spend nearly 12,000 working minutes over five days on a single plan – 70% of which goes into data management rather than strategy.

Worse still, plans quickly become outdated, and time and resource constraints often result in tasks not being updated or compared to alternatives.

Mirren used the conflict in the Indo-Pacific region as an example. “There is a plan in place and we are supposed to constantly update it based on new information and ready to be implemented at any time. It should be dynamic. Is it in reality?”

After leaving the Marine Corps, Mirren went to Harvard Business School before going to Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s disinformation team during the 2018 midterm elections. Later, he led product at a few startups. He and CTO Shah Hussain founded Pytho in the summer of 2023 after talking with people still serving in the military and hearing that mission planning was still a big pain point.

The startup consists of just four people, split between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. But its ambitions are to change mission planning for every serving member of the armed forces through a streamlined software product. Instead of a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure well understood by today’s service members, supported by a system of AI agents to generate plans in any format.

The company’s first demo focuses on task analysis, a 48-step process that is generally time-consuming but now takes just minutes to complete.

Humans stay in the loop, and after the draft is created, Pytho invites planners to edit when needed. The company has included features like trust scores to put information in context, and the software can integrate with Microsoft products to fit into existing workflows.

Mirren emphasized that they are building the product to ensure it is accessible to a range of end users, whether that be 18-year-old specialists fresh out of high school or two-star generals with decades of service behind them.

Of course, breaking into the Ministry of Defense is extremely difficult. Pytho claims to have already worked with “almost every service” by integrating the company’s engineers with modules to co-build planning workflows.

“Service members out there need people who are just dedicated to building these plans,” he said. “It would almost be a shame not to have a company dedicated to this.”

If you want to learn from Pytho AI first-hand, experience dozens of additional presentations, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Head here to learn more about this year’s Disruptthis week in San Francisco.