Pytho AI comes out of hiding with an ambitious proposal for the Department of Defense: turn mission planning, which takes soldiers days, into a process measured in minutes.
The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Marine intelligence officer whose teams situated insurgents, IEDs, weapons and other intelligence. The idea for the company got here from observing how planners spend their days developing mission plans for a single operation, he told TechCrunch. Pytho AI was among the 20 finalists of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025’s Top 20 Startup Battlefield.
As he explains, war plans do not only involve large-scale conflicts that may very well be called “war games.” Instead, on a regular basis service members execute plans for every part from disaster preparedness to flight missions.
Mearn saw the established order firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team created plans the same way most military do today: by assembling maps, diagrams, tables and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then sending them on for review.
“It’s too slow for the speed at which the battlefield is currently moving,” he said. The planning process can produce over 150 products and artifacts, and a five-person team can spend roughly 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on a single plan, 70% of which is spent on data management slightly than strategy.
Worse still, plans quickly develop into outdated, and time and resource constraints often mean missions are not updated or compared to alternatives.
Mearn cited the Indo-Pacific conflict as an example. “There is a plan that we should constantly update based on new information and ready to implement at any time. It should be dynamic. Is this really the case?”
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After leaving the Marine Corps, Mearn attended Harvard Business School and then Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s disinformation team mid-semester in 2018. He later led product at several startups. He and CTO Shah Hossain founded Pytho in the summer of 2023 after talking to people still serving in the military and hearing that mission planning remained a major concern.
The startup is made up of only 4 people, divided between Washington and San Francisco. However, its ambition is to transform mission planning for every service member in the armed forces through streamlined software. Instead of a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure that is easily understood by today’s service members, supported by an AI agent system to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo focuses on mission evaluation, a strategy of 48 steps that are typically time-consuming but currently take just a few minutes.
People stay in the loop, and once a draft is generated, Pytho software invites planners to edit as needed. The company has included features akin to trust rankings to contextualize information, and the software might be integrated with Microsoft products to adapt to existing workflows.
Mearn emphasized that they are building the product to make it accessible to a wide selection of end users, whether or not they are 18-year-old professionals fresh out of highschool or two-star generals with many years of service.
Of course, breaking into the Department of Defense is extremely difficult. Pytho says it already works with “almost every service,” bringing the company’s engineers into units to co-create planning workflows.
“Service members need people who are committed solely to creating these plans,” he said. “It would almost be a disservice if there wasn’t a company doing this.”