Defense startup Pytho AI wants to turbocharge military mission planning and it will show off its tech at Disrupt 2025

Python AI Smart is coming out with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: Turn mission planning that turns warfighters’ days into processes measured in minutes.

The startup was founded by former Marine human-intelligence officer Michael Mern whose teams tracked insurgents, IEDs, weapons and other intelligence. He told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came from seeing planners spend days creating mission plans for a single operation. Python AI is a top 20 Startup battlefield finalist TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

As he explains, war planning is not just about large-scale conflicts, which one might think of as “war games.” Instead, day-to-day service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparedness to flight missions.

Marron saw the status quo. In Afghanistan, his team created plans the way the military still does today: assembling maps, diagrams, tables and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then sending them out for review.

“Now it’s too slow for how fast the battlefield moves now,” he said. Over 150 products and artifacts can be created during the planning process, and a team of five people can spend about 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on a plan—70% of which goes to data management rather than strategy.

Worse, plans quickly become stale, and time and resource constraints often mean missions aren’t updated or alternatives compared.

Mearn uses a conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. “There is a plan that exists that we want to constantly update based on new information and be ready to execute at any time. It should be dynamic. Is it realistic?”

After leaving Marine, Maron attended Harvard Business School before moving to Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s disinformation team in mid-2018. He later led product at a few startups. He and CTO Shah Hussain founded Python in the summer of 2023 after talking to people still serving in the military and hearing that mission planning was a major pain point.

The startup is just four people, split between Washington, DC and San Francisco. But its ambition is to transform mission planning with a streamlined software product for every member of the armed forces. Instead of a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure that is well understood by today’s service members, powered by a system of AI agents to create plans in any format.

The company’s first demo centers on mission analysis, a process with 48 steps that is normally time-intensive but now takes just a few minutes to complete.

Humans stay in the loop, and after creating drafts, Python software invites planners to make edits where needed. The company includes features such as confidence scores to contextualize information, and the software can integrate with Microsoft products to align with existing workflows.

Mearn emphasized that they are building the product to ensure that a range of end users can access it, from 18-year-old experts fresh out of high school to two-star generals with decades of service behind them.

Of course, breaking into the Defense Department is notoriously challenging. Python claims it has already worked with “almost every single service” to get company engineers to co-build planning workflows with units.

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

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