Armada: Bringing High-Tech AI to the Most Remote Places on Earth
Armada founders Dan Wright and Jon Runyan are looking to bring compute to remote places: “Do that, and there’s a lot you can do with AI.”
Armada
Led by former DataRobot CEO Dan Wright, one-year-old Armada is leveraging a “close collaboration” with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to offer edge computing to oil rigs, mines, and distant battlefields. It’s raised $55 million at a valuation approaching $250 million.
On oil rigs and at remote mines, the possibilities for using exciting new artificial intelligence models have been slowed down by one basic problem: data. By remote sensor, camera, and drone, they’re generating it by the terabyte. Then it usually just sits there.
“Nothing is being done with this data, and that just seemed crazy to me,” Dan Wright, CEO of startup Armada told Forbes. “Once I got into the problem of bridging that digital divide, I couldn’t help it; I just couldn’t stop.”
Armada has spent the past year building what it believes is the solution: a full-stack technology platform that brings AI grade computing capabilities to industrial devices that might benefit from them. A big piece of that: building on top of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. While other startups have leveraged SpaceX in their strategies for mining or manufacturing in space, Armada believes it’s the first to be built on top of Starlink, SpaceX’s network of internet-provider satellites. Its software suite, Commander, includes tools for managing and connecting Starlinks and other internet assets to ensure connectivity in remote areas.
Armada also offers an app store of its own and others’ apps for working with generated data on location (think sensors warning of pending needed maintenance or unexpected visitors at a remote mining site). Then there’s the hardware: a weatherized mobile data center in a box called a Galleon that can fit on the back of a flatbed truck, and which can house racks of GPUs, or graphics processing units, crucial to running AI models.
“We need more companies to try to solve problems where, if the tech works and the company is successful, the world is a better place for it.”
While startups like OpenAI and Anthropic have raised billions of dollars in a race to build bigger and more powerful AI models, Armada is one of the most promising of another wave of startups looking to unlock their capabilities for business uses far from Silicon Valley or an Amazon Web Services data center. Cofounded with Jon Runyan last December, Armada already employs 60 people in the Bay Area and Seattle, where it’s hiring away from the cloud and AI staff at cloud heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft.
Armada has no customers beyond a proof-of-concept trial, meaning its revenue remains at zero so far. But investors are bullish about its opportunities in energy, manufacturing, and mining, as well as defense. In January, venture capital firms Founders Fund,
