Anyone who has served in a role requiring familiarity with fires and clearance procedures will have their ears perk up at the word “Smack”.

In NATO brevity, it is the clearance to employ ordnance or fires on surface target coordinates. Hearing that a company named Smack Technologies raised a $61 million Series B on August 18 grabbed my attention like a passenger pulling the emergency brake. The capital, co-led by Costanoa Ventures and First In, brought Smack’s total funding past $90 million in roughly five and a half months.

The name immediately signals where the company intends to head. How they plan to get there, however, is the complicated part. The fresh capital is not simply scaling their command-level software, Omega; it is funding their entry into physical hardware via Alpha, a flexible, forearm-worn tactical display designed to run in communications-denied environments and replace grease pencils and field whiteboards.

General James Mattis famously observed: "The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears". The fundamental question for Smack is whether an early-stage startup can build the technology to capture that final frontier of warfare by digitizing and operationalizing those critical six inches under fire.