NODA AI: Building the future of operational collaborative autonomy at the frontlines

Through our defense tech roadmap, we’ve observed that we’re in the midst of a significant transformation in the industry where autonomous systems are rapidly moving from concept to combat. Over the past decade, demand for such technologies has given rise to a new generation of defense tech startup trailblazers. We believe strongly that we’re still in the early days of autonomy reaching its full potential.

The critical readiness gap: coordination hasn’t kept pace with capability

As autonomy proliferates at scale, new challenges, particularly around command and control, have emerged in orchestrating mission objectives and tactics across numerous heterogeneous autonomous systems. For example, unmanned systems tend to be siloed and exclusive to original equipment manufacturer ecosystems, leading to fragmentated capabilities and a lack of resiliency and interplay. And mixed capability tactics development is virtually non-existent, making it difficult to coordinate and optimize network effects in a shared environment. Without a unified platform to develop, maintain, and distribute heterogeneous tactics, as well as to coordinate across diverse sensors, robots, and drones, mission commanders have to resort to manual coordination and control, which can oftentimes be ineffective and unscalable.

There’s a pressing need for command and control systems to scale coordination simultaneously across thousands of mixed fleet assets, both manned and unmanned. In some ways, this is not new news — the U.S. Department of War has pursued vendor-agnostic orchestration for nearly two decades through various agencies and initiatives. What has changed in today’s paradigm, though, is both the urgency and the art of the possible: the rise of mass autonomy in the battlefield has made the need for such solutions even more dire, and the current wave of AI technology has accelerated innovation to unlock autonomous collaborative teaming solutions that weren’t viable previously. 

NODA rises to the challenge of solving algorithm warfare and collaborative teaming 

NODA AI founders, Philong Duong and Dave Corbett, recognized the critical need for operational autonomy firsthand during their service as joint fires instructors in the Marine Corps. They have since dedicated their professional careers to bridging this gap, most recently leading C3.ai’s Defense and Intelligence Products team to build products in service of this mission. Driven by their product and mission focus, Philong and Dave built and demoed NODA’s Urza platform within months of founding the company, offering a powerful AI-native strategic orchestration platform that warfighters can leverage for real-time tactics management and execution across mixed fleet assets.

Urza combines decades of innovation in deterministic models with cutting-edge frontier AI to create a tactics repository and a reasoning engine capable of near-real-time task optimization and delegation. It consolidates functions traditionally distributed across strike cells, operations centers, and battle staffs into a single, AI-powered platform. Central to NODA’s approach is a commitment to vendor agnosticism and interoperability. NODA's semantic abstraction layer complements and integrates with existing technologies in minutes, transforming disparate assets into collaborative nodes capable of delivering combined, cohesive effects. In less than a year, NODA has built one of the largest technically integrated ecosystems of defense autonomous systems and enabling software.  

At Bessemer, we seek to partner with exceptional teams leading the charge on fundamental technological evolutions. When we met Philong and Dave, we immediately recognized a mission-driven team with the vision and execution capability to build a category-defining company. They aren't simply applying AI to existing military workflows — they're fundamentally reimagining how autonomous operations are conducted.

Alongside our co-investors Outlander and Crosslink, as well as Booz Allen Hamilton Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Draper Associates, we’re pleased to lead NODA's $25 million Series A. We look forward to partnering with Philong, Dave, and the NODA team as they build the future of collaborative autonomy.