Salesforce to Buy Rune, a Military AI Logistics Firm

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Rune Technologies, a two-year-old company that makes software for forecasting and moving military supplies when networks are cut off. Salesforce announced the deal on 29 October. It describes Rune as “a leading edge-native technology provider building solutions to enable critical logistics and sustainment operations for the U.S. military and allied nations”. Neither company has given a price. Reuters reported that the financial terms “were not immediately disclosed”.

Salesforce expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2027, which ends in January, “subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions”. Rune will join Missionforce, Salesforce’s government and defence business. Salesforce calls it the company’s “most significant national security-focused acquisition”.

What Rune’s software does

Rune’s main product is TyrOS. On its product page, Rune calls it “one AI-powered platform for tracking supply, forecasting demand, and routing distribution”. It also offers Saga, which it describes as “the AI agent built on top of TyrOS”. The software is designed for what the military calls DDIL conditions: denied, degraded, intermittent or limited connectivity. TyrOS stores the most important inventory, route and vehicle data locally, so units can keep working offline. It then sends data when a connection returns.

Salesforce’s description is similar. It says Rune’s models “forecast demand and resupply needs, recommend resource allocation and transportation routing, and help teams evaluate logistics plans”, with data “synchronizing when the network returns”. Salesforce calls these “super intelligence (SI)” capabilities, which is its own marketing term.

The software is already in use. Salesforce says it is “already deployed with the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps”. In an announcement on 7 October, Rune said the Army had chosen TyrOS for I Corps under its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) programme, as that programme moves to production. Rune said the Army’s first NGC2 application awards “carry a collective one-year value of approximately $93.6 million”, but it did not give its own share. The same release lists a $4.1m Army award for coordinating supplies for autonomous systems, Rune’s role as logistics application provider on the Marine Corps’ Project Dynamis, and a first Air Force award through AFWERX.

David Tuttle and Peter Goldsborough founded Rune in 2024. Salesforce says the founders draw on “leadership experience at Anduril”, the defence contractor whose employees recently sold shares at a valuation of about $90bn, according to Bloomberg.

Salesforce’s case for the deal

Kendall Collins, who runs Missionforce and Salesforce’s government cloud, said: “Salesforce is doubling down on national security with our most significant acquisition in this space.” He added that Rune “extends that work into frontline logistics, bringing agent-powered capabilities to the tactical edge – keeping equipment, supplies, and personnel moving.”

Tuttle said Rune was built for “military sustainers at the front lines, where they need to make critical battlefield decisions even without reliable connectivity”. He added: “With Salesforce, we can take what we’ve built further, connecting operational logistics from the frontline to the enterprise.”

Salesforce also gave figures for its defence business. It says that, one year after Missionforce launched, the defence business “is growing 80% year over year, with customers spanning all six branches of the U.S. military”. It also pointed to a 10-year US Army contract with a $5.6bn ceiling. Salesforce did not give a revenue figure, so the size of the business behind the 80% growth rate is not known.

Where Rune fits in Salesforce’s buying spree

Rune is the third Salesforce acquisition TSN has covered this month. It follows the deal for AI analytics platform Loops, which will be folded into Tableau, and the agreement to buy Braze for about $5.66bn. Reuters also listed this year’s $3.6bn purchase of Fin and last year’s $8bn deal for Informatica. It said the buying comes as investors worry that fast adoption of AI could reduce demand for traditional software.

The other deals extend Salesforce’s commercial products. Rune does something different. It takes Salesforce from the systems that bases and headquarters use to run personnel and maintenance into software used by units in the field. Salesforce’s own description sets out that split. Missionforce is the system of record for headquarters and planning, while Rune covers what it calls the “Operational Edge”. The company is betting that one vendor can supply both, with records matching up automatically once units reconnect.

A crowded field

Salesforce is not alone in targeting this area. Military logistics has become a busy market for AI start-ups. Earlier this month Watchtower Labs raised a $35m seed round to build AI for military logistics, and Smack won a SOCOM deal worth up to $7.5m to prototype an AI planning tool. Both are start-ups. Rune is taking a different route, into a large commercial software company.

Several questions remain open. Neither side has said how many people Rune employs, how much revenue it earns or how much Salesforce is paying. It is also unclear whether Rune’s Army and Marine Corps work will transfer unchanged once a commercial software company owns it. The first signs should come when the deal closes in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter, before the end of January.