From Battlefield to Boardroom: The Human Story Behind Watchtower Labs’ Bold Bet on AI

There’s a moment that every veteran knows intimately—that jarring collision between the cutting-edge technology they used in civilian life and the dated systems they were handed in the military. Akhil Iyer lived that moment over and over again during his years as a Marine Corps infantry and special operations officer. He’d pull out his iPhone, a device of almost magical capability, and then look at the tools available to him and his fellow troops in the field. The contrast was stark, almost absurd. How could the technology that let him video chat with family across oceans, navigate unfamiliar cities with pin-point accuracy, and access virtually all of human knowledge in seconds be so absent from the most critical decisions he made in service? This frustration, the kind that gnaws at you long after you’ve hung up your uniform, became the seed of something much bigger. It’s the reason Watchtower Labs exists today, emerging from stealth with $35 million in funding and a bold vision to drag military planning into the age of artificial intelligence.

What Iyer saw when he transitioned from active duty to the world of defense technology was a peculiar paradox. On one hand, the commercial world had achieved remarkable breakthroughs in AI, machine learning, and data processing—technologies that would seem almost magical to a soldier in the field. On the other hand, senior military leaders were struggling, visibly and frustratingly, to figure out how to apply any of this to their actual problems. They weren’t lacking in intelligence or vision; they were lacking in tools that could translate these abstract technological marvels into concrete operational advantages. After leaving the military, Iyer worked on counter-drone technology and eventually landed at Shield Capital as an investor in defense startups, where he had a front-row seat to this struggle. He watched senior leaders wrestle with one of the most fundamental and hardest questions in military operations: how do you allocate scarce resources across the globe? Fuel, spare parts, munitions, medical supplies, personnel—everything has to get where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, and the consequences of getting that wrong can be measured in lives lost and missions failed. That planning process, as Iyer would later describe it, is “really hard.” It was this challenge, sitting right at the intersection of technology and human consequence, that convinced him he needed to build something new.

The story of how Watchtower came together reads like a study in trust and shared purpose. When Iyer decided to build this company, his first call wasn’t to a venture capitalist or a military contractor—it was to Lou Manousos, the founder of security company RiskIQ, which had been acquired by Microsoft in 2021. That call would prove pivotal. Manousos had on his team two engineering leaders of rare caliber: Souren Aghajanyan and John Morman, both longtime Microsoft veterans who had worked on massive distributed systems and fraud protection, problems that live at the outer edges of what software can handle. These were people who understood complexity, who had spent years building systems that protect billions of dollars in transactions and serve millions of users, and who were already thinking about something intriguing: how simulation and AI could fundamentally improve planning. They saw the same gap Iyer did, from the other direction. Here were two brilliant engineers, an operator with deep military experience, and a shared conviction that they could build something genuinely new. Aghajanyan would become Watchtower’s chief technology officer, and Morman its head of engineering. The team that emerged wasn’t just a collection of skills—it was the product of a very deliberate search for people who combined technical excellence with a sense of mission.

At its heart, Watchtower’s software is an attempt to make the impossible merely very difficult. The platform lets military planners ask questions in plain language—the kind of questions a commander might actually ask, like “Can we sustain operations in this theater for three more weeks with limited fuel resupply?”—and then runs sophisticated simulations to map out possible scenarios and options. It’s not magic, though it might look like it from the outside. The engineering team built the system to model hundreds of possible futures against real-world constraints, showing the assumptions and tradeoffs behind each option while keeping human decision-makers firmly in charge of the final call. Iyer is refreshingly honest about the technical approach: the platform pairs what he calls “agentic AI” with heavy-duty mathematics, and he’s clear that you can’t simply “LLM your way” to an answer for these kinds of deeply complex optimization problems. That’s the part that requires something more than a clever language model—it requires real analysis, real simulation, and real respect for the complexity of the problem. This combination of conversational interfaces with rigorous computational foundations is what distinguishes Watchtower from the many existing military tools that focus mainly on giving commanders a clear picture of what they have right now, rather than what’s coming next. The company’s bet is that this bridge between AI, simulation, and optimization software represents the future of military planning.

Watchtower is starting with logistics—and that’s a deliberate and strategic choice. Supply decisions don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re inextricably tied to operations, to strategy, to the messy reality of how militaries actually function. So while the company’s initial software focuses on the movement of fuel, spare parts, munitions, and people across the globe, the vision is much broader. Iyer and his team plan to expand into wider operational planning, building on the foundation they’re establishing now. The early traction suggests they’re onto something. Watchtower has secured several military contracts, the most significant being a prototype contract won in January through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program, an initiative aimed at building AI tools to help the military forecast logistics needs weeks in advance. The program’s partners include U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Northern Command, and the Defense Logistics Agency—serious players with serious operational demands. The tools being developed are meant to track and forecast critical supplies such as munitions, fuel, medical materiel, and spare parts, giving planners the kind of foresight that could mean the difference between a successful mission and a failed one. It’s worth noting that Watchtower beat out other companies in a competitive process for this contract, competing against firms that might have more name recognition but, evidently, less compelling technology.

Now watchtower is growing, and the $35 million in seed funding will be put to work immediately. The first priority is building out the team; the second is delivering on the contracts already in hand and expanding the platform beyond logistics. The company currently has about 30 employees spread across offices in Bellevue, the Bay Area, Hawaii, and the Washington, D.C., area, with more than a dozen in Bellevue alone. Iyer, who lives in San Francisco, is personally committed to the Seattle area, and the company is moving to a larger Bellevue office with plans to double headcount. The rationale is rooted in talent: the Seattle region has an extraordinary density of highly technical people who might be looking for work with a bit more mission impact than their current roles offer. Interestingly, recruits don’t need military backgrounds at all. Many team members are immigrants who see this work as a way to give back to their adopted country. The company is hiring for in-person roles in Bellevue that require U.S. citizenship—engineers for the simulation engine, distributed systems, and machine learning work, among others. And Watchtower joins a growing defense tech cluster in the Seattle area, a community of companies that are increasingly making the Pacific Northwest a hub for national security technology. It’s a long way from the frustration of a Marine officer wondering why his iPhone’s technology wasn’t in his rucksack, but it’s also exactly where that frustration was always meant to lead.