Had Yurts founder Ben Van Roo’s eyes been better, he might’ve followed in his family’s footsteps and joined the Air Force. “My whole family was in the Air Force. All of them are pilots,” he said, admitting later that, “my vision wasn’t quite there.”
Instead, he’s helping the military in a very Silicon Valley way: by founding an AI integration platform that can be deployed within high-security businesses. “We’re the first one on a secret network for the Department of Defense,” he said. His goal is to be a key AI-powered chat assistant for the Department of Defense (besides the AI chatbot the Pentagon itself is developing).
With such a powerful customer, Van Roo, along with his cofounders former Meta engineer Jason Schnitzer and research scientist Guruprasad Raghavan, has raised a $40 million Series B led by XYZ Venture Capital. This brings total investment into the company to $58.35 million. Yurts currently has contracts with the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Department of Energy, as well as a $16 million contract with United States Special Operations Command.
In addition to growing up in a military family, Van Roo worked for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that does research and analysis for policymakers. At Rand, Van Roo helped research supply chain issues for the military, getting sent to places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. “I was nothing more than a nerd working on projects for different parts of the DoD,” he laughed.
He then worked on machine learning projects at education company Chegg, and then did a stint at Primer.ai, another company making defense-focused AI. Around 2017, he realized there was a huge opportunity in AI for enterprises, and adapting AI for older software systems. “My whole bet was that these models were going to keep getting better, but someone’s going to have to say, how do we roll this out to tens of thousands of people in a very secure environment?” he said. “That’s a very different bet than some of the foundation model vendors.”
Van Roo co-founded Yurts in August 2022, and has since hired 50 people — about a quarter of which have security clearance. Yurts can be used for anything like pulling data from old reports, to helping brainstorm use-cases for military technology.
But Yurts will face competition in the race to be the DoD’s AI platform of choice: Ask Sage, a generative AI company, has also already partnered with the Army, and Van Roo’s old company, Primer.ai.
Van Roo believes that we’re just scratching the surface of the potential for enterprise-ready AI. “I’m confident that in the next 10 years, we’re probably going to get a pretty big next step-jump in the model space. And I’m not going to solve that,” he said. “But I think that we have a long way to go to really achieve the value we can in enterprises.”