Python AI has come out of stealth and is making an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense. It transforms mission planning, which takes days for warfighters, into a process that can be measured in minutes.
The startup was founded by Michael Mean, a former Marine counterintelligence officer whose team has uncovered insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intelligence. He told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came from watching planners spend days building mission plans for a single operation. Pytho AI is a TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist.
As he explains, war planning is not just about large-scale conflicts that might be considered “war games.” Instead, everyday service members execute plans for everything from disaster preparedness to flight missions.
Mean saw the current situation first hand. In Afghanistan, his team developed plans in the same way that many militaries still do today. This meant assembling maps, diagrams, tables, and text in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and sending them upstream for review.
“It’s too slow for the speed of movement on today’s battlefields,” he says. The planning process can create more than 150 products and deliverables, and a team of five people can spend approximately 12,000 minutes of effort in five days on a single plan, with 70% of that spent on data management rather than strategy.
To make matters worse, plans quickly become obsolete, and missions are often not updated or compared with alternatives due to time and resource constraints.
Mr. Mean cited conflicts in the Indo-Pacific region as an example. “There is a plan that is constantly updated based on new information and is ready to be executed at any time. It should be dynamic. Is it real?”
tech crunch event
san francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
After leaving the Marines, Mean attended Harvard Business School, then went to Silicon Valley and worked on Facebook’s disinformation team during the 2018 midterm elections. He went on to lead 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 big pain point.
The startup is just four people, split between Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. But the company’s goal is to transform mission planning for every service member in the military through a streamlined software product. Rather than a chatbot interface, it uses a template structure well-understood by today’s service members and leverages a system of AI agents to generate plans in any format.
The company’s first demo focuses on mission analysis. This process consists of 48 steps and normally takes a long time, but now it only takes a few minutes to complete.
Humans are always in the know, and after generating a draft, Python’s software prompts the planner to make the necessary edits. The company has built-in features such as confidence scores to contextualize information, and the software can integrate with Microsoft products to fit into existing workflows.
Mean emphasized that the company is building its products to ensure they are accessible to a wide range of end users, from 18-year-old specialists fresh out of high school to two-star generals with decades of service under their belts.
Of course, penetrating the Pentagon is notoriously difficult. Python claims it already works with “nearly every service” by incorporating enterprise engineers into units to co-build planning workflows.
“Military forces around the world need people dedicated solely to building these programs,” he said. “It’s almost a disadvantage that there aren’t companies that specialize in doing this.”
If you want to learn first-hand from Python AI, see more pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, visit here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, happening this week in San Francisco.
