Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: turn mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes.

The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer whose teams located insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intel. The idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation, he told TechCrunch. Pytho AI is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 .

As he explains it, war plans aren’t just for large-scale conflicts, what one might think of as “war games.” Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparation to flight missions.

Mearn saw the status quo firsthand. In Af

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