Pytho AI is surreptitiously coming out with an ambitious pitch to the Defense Department: Turn mission planning that takes war fighters days into a process measured in minutes.
The startup was founded by Michael Murn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer whose teams detected insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intelligence. He told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came from watching planners spend several days creating mission plans for a single operation. Pytho AI is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield Finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
As he explains, war plans are not just for large-scale conflicts, which one might think of as “war games.” Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparedness to flying missions.
Murn saw the status quo firsthand. In Afghanistan, his team created plans the same way most armies do today: by assembling maps, diagrams, tables and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then sending them up the chain for review.
“It’s very slow considering how fast the battlefield is moving now,” he said. Over 150 products and artifacts can be created during the planning process, and a team of five people can spend approximately 12,000 minutes of labor over five days on a plan – 70% of which is spent in data management rather than strategy.
Worse, plans quickly become redundant, and missions are often not updated or compared with alternatives due to time and resource constraints.
Murn used a conflict in the Indo-Pacific as an example. “There is a plan that we must constantly update based on new information and be ready to implement at any time. It must be dynamic. Is this in reality?”
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After leaving the Marines, Murn went to Harvard Business School before moving to Silicon Valley, where he worked on Facebook’s misinformation team during the 2018 midterms. He later served as product lead at a few startups. He and CTO Shah Hussain founded Pytho in the summer of 2023 after talking to people still serving in the military and hearing that mission planning remained a major problem.
The startup is made up of just four people, split between Washington, DC and San Francisco. But its ambition is to transform mission planning for every service member in the armed forces through a streamlined software product. Instead of a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure that is well understood by service members today, powered by a system of AI agents to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo centers on mission analysis, a 48-step process that would normally take time but now takes only a few minutes to complete.
Humans stay in the loop, and after creating a draft, Pytho’s software invites planners to edit where necessary. The company has included features like confidence scores to contextualize information, and the software can integrate with Microsoft products to align with existing workflows.
Murn emphasized that they are building the product to ensure that a range of end users can access it, whether it’s an 18-year-old expert fresh out of high school or a two-star general with decades of service.
Of course, breaking into the Defense Department is extremely challenging. Pytho claims it already has work with “almost every single service” by involving company engineers with units to co-create planning workflows.
“There are service members who need people who are completely dedicated to building these plans,” he said. “It would almost be a disservice not to have a company dedicated to this.”
If you want to learn first-hand from Pytho AI, and want to see dozens of additional pitches, participate in valuable workshops, and build relationships that drive business results, To learn more about this year’s disruption, go hereThis week in San Francisco.
