Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to provide autonomous floor automobiles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the primary floor autonomy firm to function the prime contractor on a army manufacturing deal.
The almost $20 million settlement — $19.7 million, based on the Division of Battle — requires Overland to ship greater than a dozen autonomous floor automobiles, together with the software program that runs them. Preliminary deliveries are anticipated to start someday in early 2027.
The settlement was introduced June 29. The automobiles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland’s automobiles will initially deal with resupply for these crews fairly than substitute any current automobiles, co-founder and CEO Byron Boots mentioned in a media briefing, as reported by commerce publications DefenseScoop and Protection One.
Boots is a College of Washington machine-learning professor who leads the college’s Robotic Studying Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Studying on the UW’s Allen College of Laptop Science & Engineering. He co-founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the corporate’s president, spinning it out of the UW.
The corporate’s know-how is designed to let army automobiles drive themselves throughout tough, off-road terrain in locations the place GPS isn’t obtainable.
Overland has grown to greater than 100 staff and raised over $140 million in enterprise funding, together with a $100 million spherical in February led by the enterprise agency 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Seattle final 12 months, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the highest privately held Pacific Northwest tech corporations.
The corporate isn’t alone in chasing army floor autonomy. One among its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra, gained a bigger, $92 million Marine Corps manufacturing deal earlier in June — however because the autonomy provider below prime contractor Oshkosh Protection, fairly than holding the contract itself. That’s the excellence Overland is claiming as a primary.
Overland’s deal got here via a Pentagon program known as APFIT — quick for Speed up the Procurement and Fielding of Revolutionary Applied sciences — which fast-tracks funding to maneuver promising know-how from prototypes into manufacturing. For Overland, it marks a step from testing and demonstrations into constructing automobiles at scale for the army.
“We’re registering extraordinarily excessive demand from U.S. operational models who need to incorporate this know-how into their ideas of operation,” Boots mentioned within the briefing, pointing to the struggle in Ukraine as proof of a rising position for uncrewed automobiles.
Overland has been working for years with the Military, Marine Corps and Particular Operations Command, additionally finishing a multiyear DARPA autonomy program. The brand new contract builds on latest work integrating its self-driving know-how into Marine Corps automobiles.
