EpiSci

EpiSci — legally EpiSys Science — was founded in 2012 in Poway, California, and built its business almost entirely around US defence autonomy. Its flagship software, TacticalAI, takes a deliberately “trust-first” approach: a hybrid machine-learning architecture designed to keep human operators in the loop and aware of what the autonomy is doing, a direct answer to military unease about black-box decision-making in combat.

The company made its name in the air-combat domain. It was one of eight teams in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ’s 2020 AlphaDogfight Trials, then a selected performer on the agency’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programme. That work fed into the September 2023 flights in which the X-62A VISTA — a modified F-16 testbed — became the first aircraft to fly AI-controlled, within-visual-range dogfights against a live human-piloted F-16. In June 2024 EpiSci, working with PhysicsAI, won a roughly $6 million Phase 1 contract under DARPA’s follow-on Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements programme, aimed at multi-ship beyond-visual-range air combat. Beyond aviation it developed drone-swarm software, branded SwarmSense and embeddable into PX4/MAVLink small uncrewed aircraft, plus surface-warfare and maritime-tracking autonomy demonstrated with the US Navy.

In February 2025 the autonomy-software firm Applied Intuition acquired EpiSci to extend its portfolio from ground systems into the air, sea and space domains. Financial terms were not disclosed; EpiSci became a wholly owned subsidiary under Applied Intuition’s defence arm, and its founding leadership — chief executive Bo Ryu and co-founder Tamal Bose — was retained. The acquisition placed a long-running DARPA performer inside a fast-growing commercial-autonomy company, and gave Applied Intuition a credible foothold in the contested business of putting AI in the cockpit, a field where Shield AI and Anduril are also competing.