Rune Technologies' Peter Goldsborough on modernizing military logistics with software built for the trenches

Summary

Peter Goldsborough, CTO of Rune Technologies, is betting that the most neglected layer of modern military capability isn't a new weapons system — it's the spreadsheet a logistician is staring at in the field.

Rune builds logistics software purpose-built for military use, targeting what Goldsborough describes as a stark gap: while defense tech investment has flowed toward drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, and autonomous systems, almost nothing has gone into the software that tracks where spare parts, fuel, and ammunition actually are. Logisticians in the field today are working off whiteboards, Excel, and scraps of paper. Goldsborough's point is simple — that gap is the problem Rune exists to close.

Why now

The Global War on Terror didn't stress-test military logistics the way a peer conflict does. U.S. air superiority meant supply shipments arrived intact, and logistics software was never the priority. Ukraine changed that calculus. Russia's near-failure to take Kyiv was substantially a logistics failure, and Goldsborough says even Ukraine's forces are tracking consumption at the tactical level with paper and whiteboards. The U.S. military, he argues, isn't materially different from that baseline right now.

What Rune actually builds

The software is designed to run on a laptop in a jungle or a trench — no reliable internet connection assumed. That offline-first architecture is a deliberate product constraint, not a limitation. Goldsborough says the way you write software for a stable data center with infinite bandwidth is fundamentally different from what works in a contested environment, and Rune is built for the latter.

The longer roadmap moves away from human data entry entirely. Right now, the military knows how much fuel is at a location because a soldier dips a stick into a tank and reads the level. Rune wants sensors to automate that count — for fuel, ammunition, and other consumables — removing humans from the inventory loop where possible. Mobile is already appearing at the lowest unit levels, with soldiers and Marines filing logistical reports on phones, and Rune is working on integrations there.

On data integration, the architecture is open. Rune ingests from programs of record, other systems, PDFs, and manual inputs, and combines them into recommendations that account not just for what's on hand but what transportation is available, which routes are viable, and what crews can move equipment. Goldsborough's view is that logistics decisions break down in the real world the moment any one of those data layers is missing.

Go-to-market

Rune is running a parallel track. Operational units in the field are design partners — not the source of large contracts, but essential for building the right product. Alongside that, Rune is engaging service innovation labs and program offices directly. Goldsborough notes that sustainment is now embedded in major Army modernization programs in a way it wasn't two years ago, which creates a larger addressable surface across the procurement stack.

The sales motion benefits from one structural advantage: Goldsborough says he has never had to convince a customer that logistics is a real problem. The logistician branch lives it daily, and even non-logistics officers — artillery, for example — can be shown how better munitions visibility makes them more lethal.

Team and hiring

Rune is 12 people and has been adding one engineer per week for the past four weeks. The current hiring push is for product managers, ideally veterans who now want to build technology. Engineers with mission orientation — Goldsborough's own path out of Facebook and Anduril — are the long-term core.

The company sees expansion beyond defense as a future option. Disaster relief, oil and gas, and other industries with complex field logistics share similar operational profiles, but that remains a longer-term possibility rather than a near-term focus.