Raytheon Technologies [RTX] on Thursday said its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in EpiSys Science
(EpiSci), a small California-based company developing autonomous solutions for defense and security applications.
The value of the investment wasn’t disclosed.
EpiSci recently was one of multiple award winners on the Air Force’s $950 million contract related to Joint All Domain Command and Control program. EpiSci will bring its tactical artificial intelligence-based communications and network management solutions for low-cost configuration, autonomous reconfiguration, and faster decision making.
“EpiSci is a leader in rapidly deployable, hardware-agnostic autonomy solutions and a key enabler to the AI-embedded battlefield of the future,” Daniel Ateya, managing director of RTX Ventures, said in a statement. “As an early investor, we plan to support EpiSci’s endeavors in creating a trust-based collaborative environment between humans and AI-enabled machines.”
EpiSci said the investment validates the company’s Tactical AI “as a viable approach for enabling trusted autonomy for the future” and that it will allow it to scale the “technology across multiple battlefield domains.”
Bo Ryu, the company’s president, said in a statement that “We firmly believe that our Tactical AI delivers both the trust and performance that human operators need and minimizes the limitations of end-to-end machine learning approaches.”
In 2021, the EpiSci’s Tactical AI technology was used as part of the Air Force’s Golden Horde Vanguard program that is developing algorithms to control future networked, collaborative and autonomous weapons. The company says its technology is a modular, hybrid AI design architecture with a “trust-first focus and explicit bounding for mission critical, human-machine teaming applications.”
SwarmSense, a product listed on EpiSci’s website, enables AI-powered drone swarms for industrial and military applications.