Overland AI
Seattle ground-autonomy firm born from DARPA RACER; its OverDrive stack, OverWatch C2 and ULTRA vehicle drive GPS-denied off-road missions for the Army and Marine Corps.
Background
Overland AI was founded in Seattle in 2022 by Byron Boots, a professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Washington who remains chief executive, together with co-founder and president Stephanie Bonk and co-founder Greg Okopal. The company grew directly out of Boots' academic work on DARPA's RACER off-road autonomy program, and it stayed a RACER performer through Phase II of the program — an unusually deep government-research pedigree for a startup this young.
Its product set has three layers: OverDrive, a vehicle-agnostic autonomy stack built for terrain with no roads, no GPS and degraded communications; OverWatch, a command-and-control interface introduced alongside the Series A in 2025 that lets a single operator coordinate a fleet of uncrewed machines; and ULTRA, the company's own purpose-built autonomous tactical ground vehicle. In 2025 the company opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in Seattle to move from prototypes into low-rate manufacturing.