The DoD is buying thousands of drones, ground robots, and autonomous vessels but lacks trained operators to control them. As fleets scale, human bandwidth (rather than hardware) becomes the limiting factor.

Chord’s TEMPO™ lets a single operator, with minimal training, command and synchronize fully autonomous air, ground, and surface vehicles within one interface - turning one operator into the equivalent of ten. The tech has proven itself across multiple large-scale military exercises.

The technical founding team comes from Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, worked together at Novel Engineering, and built the first collaborative autonomy systems for DARPA and Army Research Labs. CEO McFadden is an ex-U.S. Air Force operator who ran L3H’s $7B autonomy division; CTO Cooney led an Army-funded autonomous swarm program.

TEMPO aims to win by an order of magnitude, having coordinated 174+ platforms simultaneously (~10x competitors) across DARPA, U.S. Army, and USAF programs while integrating across dozens of unmanned vehicles. Beyond larger military deployment, Chord now looks to expand into commercial sectors including agriculture, mining, and construction.