A defense startup born in MIT's industrial analytics labs has quietly secured nearly $15 million and a string of Marine Corps contracts, its founders betting that the same algorithms once deployed to predict equipment failures in power plants can now help military logistics planners navigate the fog of contested supply chains.
Tagup disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it raised $14.8 million in Series A funding from 31 undisclosed investors, with the first sale recorded in June 2025 and the filing submitted in July 2026. The Boston-based company has parlayed that capital into three separate Marine Corps deals, the most recent a July maintenance contract with 1st Maintenance Battalion that extends its foothold beyond medical logistics and aviation units.
The contracts represent something more tangible than the typical defense-tech pitch deck. When Tagup's Manifest platform was deployed with a Marine Corps medical logistics unit, the service reported a 20 percent drop in purchasing costs and a 40 percent reduction in materiel handling, alongside a 13 percent boost in readiness—the kind of metrics that led to a contract renewal announced last September. A separate $2.07 million deal with Marine Aircraft Group 39, funded through the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Operational Test and Security Team program, was announced in late July 2025.
At its core, Manifest is what Tagup calls a "multidimensional logistics decision engine," though that description undersells the complexity. The software uses proprietary Generative Reinforcement Learning to simulate millions of logistics scenarios, quantifying risk and spitting out executable recommendations in under a minute. The goal is to help commanders balance the eternal triangle of readiness, cost, and time without drowning in spreadsheets or gut instinct.
"Every maintenance decision requires balancing readiness, cost, and time," company president Paul Plemmons said when the 1st Maintenance Battalion contract was announced. "Manifest gives maintainers the decision advantage to weigh those tradeoffs and commit to the course of action that best keeps mission-essential equipment ready and available."
That decision advantage addresses challenges spelled out in the Marine Corps' Installations and Logistics 2030 doctrine, which anticipates supply chains disrupted by adversaries capable of targeting vulnerable logistical nodes. In that vision of future conflict, the ability to rapidly model alternatives becomes a competitive edge.
Jon Garrity and Will Vega-Brown, who met as undergraduates at MIT, founded Tagup in 2017 with a different mission entirely. Garrity, who holds degrees in physics and economics from MIT plus an MBA from Harvard, and Vega-Brown, a PhD graduate from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, initially built predictive analytics tools for utilities and heavy industry. A 2019 MIT profile noted the platform was monitoring roughly 60,000 pieces of industrial equipment before the founders pivoted toward defense applications.
The shift appears calculated. Defense logistics, with its global scale and high stakes, generates the kind of decision volume that plays to Tagup's algorithmic strengths. In April, the company formalized a strategic alliance with KBR, the publicly traded defense contractor, to embed Manifest into KBR's logistics operations. "Sustainment at KBR's scale generates enormous decision volume: thousands of competing resource trade-offs, every day, across global theaters," Garrity said at the time.
That partnership positions Tagup in a competitive landscape increasingly crowded with software firms chasing Pentagon modernization dollars. Palantir has ongoing Defense Department supply chain work, while Gallatin AI secured an 18-month contract with the Army's III Corps earlier this year. The question is whether a startup with between 11 and 50 employees, according to LinkedIn data, can scale alongside those larger players.
Tagup has assembled a defense advisory board stocked with retired flag officers—LtGen David A. Ottignon, USMC (Ret.), came aboard in July 2026, joining LtGen Flem B. "Donnie" Walker Jr., USA (Ret.), who signed on in March 2026. The company also completed Navy SBIR Phase II work optimizing logistics for the LAV-25 fleet and participated in the National Security Innovation Network's Propel Hawaii Accelerator in mid-2024.
The company declined to disclose its post-money valuation. Filings list headquarters at 214 Cambridge Street in Boston, with offices in New York as well. For a startup that once tracked turbines and generators, the path to military supply chains may seem circuitous, but the underlying mathematics of prediction under uncertainty translates more directly than one might expect.
