Modern Intelligence

Modern Intelligence specializes in the development of maritime surveillance solutions involving the layering of multiple kinds of sensor data and automated identification of potential targets using artificial intelligence. The company is one of many emerging startups in the defense sector focusing on new technologies, such as drones and artificial intelligence, that aim to challenge the prevailing business models and dominating market presence of the largest defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon.

Cutlass is the Modern AI maritime surveillance solution designed to work with any hardware, software, or data, including legacy systems, newly deployed systems, and systems still in development. According to Modern Intelligence, other similar solutions may be limited to a single or only a few select platforms, have limited data and limited compute capabilities, be difficult to integrate with existing systems, fail to operate successfully when faced with new situations, or have a large number of sensors assigned to a small number of operators.

Visualization of an aerial scan of a vessel executed by the Cutlass AI

To correct these flaws, Cutlass is designed to enable a single operator to see and interact with the entire area of operations, purportedly offering a platform-independent AI with an open API; lower compute and retraining requirements compared to other solutions available on the market; undisruptive integration into any platform, new or old; and adaptability to new situations while in operation. Cutlass can be integrated with drones, satellites, patrol aircraft, and surface radars.

Cutlass is designed to help bring modular AI to maritime problems by performing real-time sensor fusion. In contrast to full-stack solutions, it is a "turnkey solution" with the aim to allow existing military hardware and command and control systems to track, analyze, and learn about their maritime targets on missions such as drug interdiction, vessel boarding and seizure, and fleet combat.

While less efficient maritime sensor fusion solutions may require thousands of data samples to provide only rudimentary vessel recognition, Modern's AI-based analysis techniques "learn targets, rather than memorize them," according to John Dulin, the company's CEO.

Modern Intelligence's promotional video presenting the company's Cutlass product

John Dulin, one of Modern Intelligence's founders, has stated the company is attempting to change how military systems have traditionally been built and sold to the government. He commented that historically, "[defense sector companies'] incentives have been to lock the customer into a vertical silo." As a result of this practice, data from one contractor’s sensor could not be easily integrated with data from another’s, and every contractor is building its own AI systems to classify images. Modern Intelligence hopes to facilitate an approach that utilizes a system built on simple open interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs), just like most commercially available software.

Jacqueline Tame, a former Deputy Director of the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center and former Congressional staffer, agreed to join Modern’s advisory board partly because the vision of interoperability and open standards appealed to her. She reportedly told Fortune that when she worked at the Department of Defense, she repeatedly witnessed the U.S. military get into "long-standing and protracted contracts by virtue of not understanding how the tech needs to be built to ensure that doesn’t happen.” After joining Modern's advisory board, Jacqueline Tame has made the following statement praising the company's approach and achievements:

This small company [Modern Intelligence] is doing everything right. Their models are performing at levels I have never seen, consistently. And their fundamentally different approach to AI for defense sold me immediately.

She commented further that what the military needs, especially when it comes to AI capabilities, is technology that is “agnostic to platform or infrastructure and can be interoperable with anything it needs to be interoperable with,” which is what Modern is aiming to achieve. Also on Modern’s advisory board are Ellen Lord, the former CEO of defense contractor Textron and a former Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Sustainment; and Jason Yosinki, a cofounder of Uber’s AI research lab. Upon joining Modern's advisory board, Ellen Lord commented:

The Modern Intelligence team has leveraged neural network technology to develop uniquely dynamic AI that is quick to implement, needs minimal training and will deliver incomparable capability.

Besides developing its technology to work with sensors, equipment, and data from different defense contractors, Modern Intelligence also intends to deploy machine learning methods that require less data to train and can deliver better analysis. For instance, the majority of algorithms that identify objects in images analyze them as flat, two-dimensional shapes. Tristan Tager, Modern's cofounder and chief scientist, said the company has devised a method to transform 2D image data to three-dimensional shapes, providing more training data from 2D sources compared to less sophisticated systems.

Apart from lesser data requirements to train the AI-based system, it is also more capable than those trained on large amounts of past data, but it is unable to execute tasks when confronted with an object they have not encountered in training, according to Tager, who stated in the way of example that "[Cutlass] can accurately identify and track a Chinese military vessel no one has seen before, that appears in no datasets, or where there were only one or two fuzzy images."

Tager has also stated that Modern is using methods for sensor fusion that are technically better than what many other defense contractors use. Most of these competitors, he says, don’t combine information from different sensors; instead, they simply use the data feed from the sensor in which the AI system has the highest confidence at a particular moment in time and switch between sensors if that changes. Alternatively, Modern uses methods that can actually combine data, even when it arrives on vastly different timescales—such as the difference between video frame rates and still images from satellites that might fly over a particular location only once every few hours.

Tager says Modern intends its maritime surveillance software, Cutlass, to eventually be able to provide analysts simple ways to set up high-level searches and alerts, even potentially through the use of natural language. According to Tager, an analyst might be able to type a request, such as “alert me to any ship within this operational area that is over 30 meters in length and exhibiting the following behavioral patterns,” or “show me all airbases in Western Russia where a T-160 aircraft is currently on the ground," and have it automatically fulfilled.

In 2022, Modern Intelligence revealed that it has been selected to test its maritime surveillance technology in the summer of that year at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Special Warfare’s Trident Specter exercises, which were set up to pilot emerging technologies that could be useful to U.S. Navy’s special operations forces. Modern has been developing its software partly with the support of the U.S. military’s Southern Command and its Joint Interagency Task Force South, based in Key West, Fla., which is responsible for combating drug and people trafficking in Central and South America and the Caribbean regions.

According to Fortune, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, startups in the defense sector, such as Modern Intelligence, benefitted from a wave of renewed interest from venture capitalists.