Overland AI lands Marine Corps contract worth nearly $20M to build self-driving military vehicles – GeekWire
Seattle-based Overland AI has been awarded a contract by the US Marine Corps to manufacture autonomous vehicles, a milestone for the defense technology startup making it the first independent company to serve as a prime contractor on a military manufacturing contract.
The nearly $20 million deal — $19.7 million, according to the Army Department — requires Overland to deliver more than a dozen autonomous vehicles, along with the software that runs them. First deliveries are expected to begin in early 2027.
The agreement was announced on June 29. The vehicles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland Vehicles will first address the supply of those workers instead of closing any existing vehicles, founder and CEO Byron Boots said at a press conference, as reported by trade publications DefenseScoop and Defense One.
Boots is a University of Washington machine learning professor who leads the school’s Learning Robot lab and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the company’s president, out of the UW.
The company’s technology is designed to allow military vehicles to drive themselves in rough, off-road terrain in areas where GPS is not available.
Overland has grown to more than 100 employees and raised more than $140 million in venture funding, including a $100 million round in February led by venture capital firm 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Seattle last year, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the Pacific Northwest’s top privately held tech companies.
The company is not alone in its pursuit of military independence. One of its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra, won a larger, $92 million Marine Corps manufacturing contract in early June — but as an independent supplier under prime contractor Oshkosh Defense, rather than holding the contract itself. That’s the distinction Overland is seeking as a first.
The Overland deal came through a Pentagon program called APFIT — short for Accelerate the Acquisition and Installation of New Technologies — which accelerates funding to move promising technologies from prototypes to production. For Overland, it marks a step away from testing and demonstrating military-scale vehicle development.
“We are registering a very high demand from companies operating in the US that want to include this technology in their operational concepts,” Boot said at the forum, pointing to the war in Ukraine as evidence of the growing role of autonomous vehicles.
Overland has worked for years with the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, and is completing DARPA’s multi-year autonomous program. The new contract builds on recent work to integrate its self-driving technology into Marine Corps vehicles.
