If yurt founder Ben Van Lew had better eyes, he might have followed in his family's footsteps and joined the Air Force. “My whole family was in the Air Force. They were all pilots,” he said, later admitting, “My vision wasn't that far.”
Instead, he's supporting the military in a very Silicon Valley way. The idea is to create an AI integration platform that can be deployed within high-security enterprises. “We are the first in the Pentagon's secret network,” he said. His goal is to become the Pentagon's primary AI-powered chat assistant (separate from the AI chatbot the Pentagon itself is developing).
With such a strong clientele, Van Roo, along with co-founders former meta-engineer Jason Schnitzer and research scientist Guruprasad Raghavan, raised $40 million in Series B led by XYZ Venture Capital. did. This brings the total investment in the company to $58.35 million. Yurts currently has contracts with the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, Department of Energy, and a $16 million contract with U.S. Special Operations Command.
Van Lew grew up in a military family and worked at the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit organization that provides research and analysis for policymakers. At RAND, Van Lew was deployed to places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, where he helped investigate military supply chain issues. “I was just a nerd working on projects for different departments at the Department of Defense,” he laughed.
I then worked on machine learning projects at the education company Chegg, and then at Primer.ai, another company that makes defense-focused AI. Around 2017, he realized there was a huge opportunity in enterprise AI and adapting AI to older software systems. “I was confident that these models would continue to improve, but someone had to say, how do we roll this out to tens of thousands of people in a very secure environment? ” he said. “This is a much different bet than some underlying model vendors.”
Van Roo co-founded Yurts in August 2022 and has since hired 50 people, about a quarter of whom have security clearances. Yurt can be used for anything from retrieving data from old reports to helping brainstorm military technology use cases.
But Yurts will face competition to be selected for the Pentagon's AI platform. Generative AI company Ask Sage has also already partnered with the Army and Van Roo's old company Primer.ai.
Van Roo believes we have just scratched the surface of the potential of enterprise-ready AI. “I'm convinced that within the next 10 years there's probably going to be a pretty big next step jump in the modeling space, and I'm not going to settle for that,” he said. “But I think we still have a long way to go to actually achieve the value that is possible in enterprises.”