Military operators need to rapidly make decisions in high-stakes environments, but they’re often stuck with technology that’s unable to deliver accurate information about their surroundings. Military leaders have made clear that they’re prioritizing “decision dominance” for troops, but actually shipping new technologies and getting them in the hands of end users can be more challenging.
Reveal Technology is one notable standout in this effort. The 6-year-old startup has been working with multiple branches of the U.S. Department of Defense to put its flagship software product into the hands of operators. That software, called Farsight, can rapidly convert video from drones into 3D maps that live on a smartphone. The company is already in production with a number of programs with the Army, Special Operations Command, Marine Corps, and some foreign militaries.
Farsight offers major advantages over the status quo, which is generally smartphones preloaded with two-dimensional maps. Those maps are often generated from years-old satellite data, and they frequently fail to reflect the changing nature of a battlefield, Reveal co-founder and CEO Garrett Smith explained in a recent interview.
“If you’re facing off against an adversary, any number of things could change in that environment. They could block a road, they could dig a trench line … none of that stuff is going to be reflected on a map,” he said. “Farsight solves all of that by giving you a fresh, time now, three dimensional, high resolution model of the operating environment and then allows you to measure it, analyze it, drive decisions, and understand the environment.”
Smith should know: He’s a U.S. Marine Corps officer who had deployments in Afghanistan, South Asia, and South America. He left active service around 12 years ago and has been in the reserves ever since. Being in the military had incredible upside, Smith said, “but those experiences also underscored a deep lack of technological preparedness by the U.S. Department of Defense.” Technologies that enterprise businesses adopted years ago, like cloud computing, were still on the adoption curve.
“Recognizing that while I was in harm’s way was a pretty crazy realization,” he said.
After Smith left active service, he went to Stanford University and decided to take the plunge in the world of startups. Smith was able to pivot his experience operating drones in the military to work with companies in the commercial drone industry. What he noticed was the rapid rise of cheap commercial drones alongside less expensive consumer smartphones. “There was an opportunity there to generate software value,” he explained.
He and three colleagues started Reveal Technology in December 2018 to build the software tool that is now Farsight. In addition to generating maps, the software can also simulate an adversary’s field of view, provide route planning, determine height and distance, and provide other analytics.
“There’s a huge amount and a growing volume of visual information being collected in these operating environments, and we’re simply trying to be the software layer that reduces the cognitive burden on the human operator to make decisions,” Smith said.
Along the way, the startup also acquired DFL Technology to onboard its product, Identifi, a mostly smartphone-based biometrics and human identity data collection and verification system. The through line between Reveal’s two products is the decision dominance piece: providing tactical information at the edge and in mobile environments. If Farsight is all about navigating the physical terrain, Smith said, “Identifi is all about the human terrain.”
Investors have been paying attention: The company just closed a $11.2 million Series A led by Next Frontier Capital, with participation from defy.vc and 8VC, to scale its team and build out its product lineup — to do nothing less than, as Smith put it, “dominate the mobile and edge space.”