Jane Edwards 
- Mythic has launched a new board comprising former defense and government officials
- Stephen Rodriguez, a DCVC investor, will serve as chairman
- Five additional founding members bring defense and intelligence expertise
Mythic has formed a defense advisory board made up of former senior military and government leaders to help guide the integration of its low-power artificial intelligence processors into U.S. defense and national security programs.
What Will the Defense Advisory Board Do?
The company said Wednesday the board will work to align its analog processing unit, or APU, technology with mission requirements across the Department of War and the intelligence community as both pursue high-performance, low-latency AI compute at the tactical edge.
Mythic CEO Taner Ozcelik said the company’s APU architecture is designed to reduce the power and performance constraints associated with traditional digital processors while significantly cutting size, weight, power consumption and cost.
“We believe Mythic solutions are ideally suited for the rigorous demands of the defense sector, and having this extraordinary team of defense and intelligence leaders advising us provides the opportunity to ensure that our technology will be precisely aligned with the most critical and complex needs of the U.S. national security mission,” Ozcelik said.
Stephen Rodriguez, a defense investor at DCVC, will chair the Mythic Defense Advisory Board. Rodriguez previously served in the U.S. government before spending 13 years as a defense investor.
“Our national security enterprise operates in environments where every watt and millisecond matters,” Rodriguez said. “To maintain our strategic advantage, the U.S. government needs to be the first to adopt paradigm-shifting technologies. Mythic solutions have the potential to enable a meaningful geopolitical advantage with its cost effective, energy efficient solutions for western datacenter and edge environments.”
Who Are the Founding Members of the Mythic Defense Advisory Board?
In addition to Rodriguez, the other founding members of the board are:
- Dawn Meyerriecks, former CIA deputy director for science and technology
- Deanna Burt, a retired U.S. Space Force lieutenant general
- Ellen Lord, former under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and a four-time Wash100 awardee
- Jim Rainey, a retired U.S. Army general and former commanding general of Army Futures Command
- John Clark, former corporate chief technology officer and head of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works
How Does the Advisory Board Build on Mythic’s Growth Initiatives?
The formation of the new advisory board comes after a series of commercial and technical milestones for Mythic over the past several months.
In December, Mythic closed an oversubscribed $125 million funding round led by DCVC, with participation from NEA, SoftBank and Honda Motor, among others. Two months later, the company signed a joint development agreement with Honda to co-develop an automotive-grade AI chip for next-generation software-defined vehicles. In May, the company acquired Videantis, a European digital processor IP firm, to build out a hybrid analog-digital compute platform.
