- Brunner has served as chief revenue officer since April
- He led public sector businesses at PsiQuantum and Primer AI
- Merlin is the prime contractor on USSOCOM’s C-130J autonomy program
Merlin has promoted Mark Brunner to president, elevating the executive who has served as its chief revenue officer since April.
Brunner will continue building customer relationships and representing the company’s work delivering operational autonomy to government and commercial customers, Merlin said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday.
“I look forward to working even more closely with our customers and partners to bring Merlin’s assured autonomy to the missions that need it,” Brunner said in a separate post.
What Experience Does Brunner Bring to the Role?
Brunner served 20 years as a Navy pilot before moving into defense policy and technology roles.
He spent nearly two years as executive vice president for the public sector at PsiQuantum and, before that, two and a half years as president of the public sector at Primer AI. Earlier, he was a vice president at The Cohen Group and a senior adviser to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., handling national security and energy policy after serving as the senator’s national security adviser.
Brunner managed aviation funding as the secretary of the Navy’s representative to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees from 2007 to 2009 and worked as a military legislative assistant to former Sen. John Warner, R-Va., then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He also served as a defense policy adviser at the U.S. Mission to the European Union.
He was a commissioner on the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption and a member of the Aerospace Industries Association’s International Council.
What Is Merlin Working On?
Merlin develops the Merlin Pilot, an autonomy system for fixed-wing aircraft, and is the prime contractor to U.S. Special Operations Command for integrating autonomy on the C-130J under a potential five-year, $105 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract awarded in 2024. The company completed the critical design review for that program in June, moving it from design into aircraft integration and positioning it for a formal test campaign.
Merlin is also pursuing reduced-crew capability on the KC-135. In July 2025, it signed an agreement with Northrop Grumman to integrate the Merlin Pilot into the Beacon autonomous testbed ecosystem.
Merlin became a public company in March through a merger with Inflection Point.
