Watchtower Labs, a Bellevue-based defense technology startup, raised $35 million in seed funding to build AI-powered logistics and planning tools for the U.S. military.
The company emerged from stealth the week of Oct. 19 with the funding round led by Shield Capital and Conviction, with participation from Founders Fund, as first reported by GeekWire. The company was incubated inside Shield Capital, where co-founder and CEO Akhil Iyer previously worked as an investor.
Iyer, a former Marine Corps special operations officer, co-founded Watchtower in 2024 alongside CTO Souren Aghajanyan and head of engineering John Morman. Aghajanyan and Morman are former Microsoft engineering leaders who spent years building large-scale distributed systems, according to the company's press release.
The startup's software focuses on military logistics planning, helping commanders figure out how to move fuel, spare parts, munitions and people where they're needed in time.
The platform models hundreds of possible futures against real-world constraints and shows the tradeoffs behind each option, the company said. Planners can ask questions in plain language.
"Planning for that is really hard," Iyer told GeekWire, referring to the challenge of allocating scarce military resources across the globe.
Watchtower already holds several military contracts, according to GeekWire. Its most significant is a prototype contract won in January through the Defense Innovation Unit's (DIU) Joint Sustainment Decision Tool (JSDT) program.
That program, launched in August 2025, aims to use commercial AI tools to forecast logistics needs weeks in advance, according to a DIU announcement. Partners include U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Northern Command and the Defense Logistics Agency.
For Bellevue, the local footprint matters. The company has 15 employees in the region and 30 total, with plans to grow to 50 within a year, according to 425 Business. Watchtower is moving to a larger Bellevue office and hiring in-person roles that require U.S. citizenship, including engineers for its simulation engine, distributed systems and machine learning work.
Iyer, who is based in San Francisco, told GeekWire the Seattle area is a core hiring focus because of its density of technical workers who "maybe wanted to work on things with a little bit more mission impact."
Raj Shah, founder and managing partner at Shield Capital and chairman of Watchtower Labs, said in a statement that Shield Capital sits at the intersection of frontier technology and "teams that understand the mission."
The $35 million will go toward building out the team, delivering on existing contracts and expanding the platform beyond logistics into broader operational planning, Iyer told GeekWire. The startup has revenue but is not disclosing figures.
Watchtower joins a growing cluster of defense technology companies in the Seattle area. Anduril has about 560 employees in Bellevue and Seattle, and Shield AI picked nearby Des Moines to build its autonomous fighter jet, according to GeekWire.
