If you've ever sat on a tarmac wondering who exactly is in charge, the answer is a lot of people you'll never meet, making fast judgment calls on your behalf. A storm is building over Denver. Which flights get rerouted? Which ones wait? What happens to the connections three hours from now if someone guesses wrong? For decades, those calls have come down to experienced operators watching screens and doing the math in their heads.

When we first backed ASI at its seed round in 2018, the founders were betting that software could eventually help make those calls. That was a big bet at the time. AI could sort photos and recommend movies. Reasoning through a live air traffic problem with thousands of moving parts was a much harder problem, and plenty of people thought it was years away. 

Eight years later, the bet is paying off in a big way. ASI announced a $325M Series C led by Spark Capital, with participation from Citadel Securities, Meritech Capital, Craft Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), valuing the company at $3B. We're thrilled to invest again - this is now the fourth round where we've backed ASI.

What does ASI do?

ASI (formerly Air Space Intelligence) builds AI that helps people run critical physical systems: air traffic, military logistics, and the electric grid. Its software models what's likely to happen hours, days, and weeks ahead, then recommends what to do about it, so operators can fix problems before they spread.

The company was founded in 2018 by Phillip Buckendorf (CEO), Kris Dorosz, and Lucas Kukielka, and is headquartered in Boston with offices in Washington, DC, Denver, and Europe. Customers include the FAA, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Alaska Airlines, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Indo-Pacific Command, and National Grid.

Why should you pay attention?

A lot of America's critical infrastructure is running at or past what it was built to handle. Air traffic control is stretched thin. Electricity demand is climbing fast, and utilities have to upgrade the grid without letting the lights flicker. Military logistics have to work across the globe, often in contested regions.

Most of this still runs on people reacting to what's on their screens right now. Those people are very good at their jobs. But even the best dispatcher can only track so much at once, and by the time a problem shows up on screen, the clock is already running.

ASI has spent eight years building AI that manages planes, vessels, and power, in places where a wrong answer has real consequences. These industries set an extremely high bar for trust, and it takes years of proof to clear it. Once a company does, customers tend to stay. ASI reports zero customer churn in more than five years of operations.

How does it actually work?

ASI runs continuous simulations of an operation forward in time. Picture a weather forecast for an airline's entire schedule, or for a region's power grid. The system watches many signals at once, including weather, schedules, demand, and equipment status, plays out what's likely to happen next, and flags trouble while there's still time to act. It blends two kinds of modeling: fixed rules for the things that must be exact, and probability-based models for the things that are uncertain, like weather.

The second piece is judgment. ASI uses reasoning models to capture how experienced operators make decisions and turns that know-how into software that can recommend, and in some cases make, the call. The system keeps learning as it goes.

Each deployment teaches ASI more about how an industry works and opens up the next use case. That's how the company moved from airlines to the FAA, from the Air Force to the Army, and now into the power grid. ASI has organized around that expansion, with dedicated presidents running Defense, Civil Aviation, and Energy, and a leadership bench that includes alumni of Palantir and Anduril and a retired three-star general.

Why are we invested?

ASI keeps doing what it said it would do, at a pace we rarely see in government work.

When we shared our last investment in November 2025, ASI had a strong pipeline of potential government contracts. Eleven months later, much of that pipeline has turned into signed programs:

• FAA: In June, the FAA awarded ASI a 12-year, $875M program of record to modernize the National Airspace System, beating out Palantir and Thales. The first implementation went live in September. According to ASI, it's one of only four tech companies founded since 2000 to win a federal program of record this size.
• Army: This month, the Army awarded ASI a five-year, $99M contract to scale its technology across the Army's command and control work, including the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) program.
• Energy: National Grid, which serves more than 20 million people in the Northeast, formally announced its partnership with ASI for grid planning and operations, and early deployment is showing results.

The business numbers have kept pace, with ARR up nearly 5x year over year, defense ARR up 12x, and again, zero customer churn in more than five years.

Software that helps experts make high-stakes decisions, and increasingly makes some of them, could be the next major category of enterprise software. ASI is building it in the industries where trust is hardest to earn, and every new deployment makes the platform smarter. Phillip describes the goal as building an automated nervous system for the country's most important systems. Eight years in, that reads less like a slogan and more like a product roadmap.

What's next?

ASI is putting this funding toward expanding into energy, logistics, and military operations in the field, and toward growing its AI research and engineering teams in Boston. To learn more, visit https://www.asi.com, or reach out to our team for an introduction.