On February 18, 2024, IAN LAFFEY posted on x that he and two others hed just met built a cheap Drone at a hackathon that called Calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and google maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha léVy and carl schooler, was all engineers under the age of 25.
The tech had clear potential to combat rampant gps jamming of draones in Ukraine. Intead of GPS, Drone Operators there have to use high-tech goggles to guide their drones by sight. But that leads to lots of problems, especially under poor conditions like thick fog or at night.
At the end of the hackathon, schoeller wished his two teams well and parted, hoping their paths might cross again.
But the tweet went viral and changed their lives. A Day Later, The Three Decided to Apply to Y Combinator, Successfully Getting Into Its Spring 2024 Cohort.
Now, their san francisco-based company, TheseusHas just Raised $ 4.3 Million in Seed Funding in A Round Led by first round capital, with additional backing from y combing and lux capital, it exclusively told techcrunt.
Theseus joins a flock of other Drone-Related Startups. There’s Skydio, which focuses on replacing chinese draones for us law enforcement and was Last Valued at $ 2.2 Billion in 2023Shield AI, which builds reconnaissance draones, Raised at a $ 5.3 billion Valuation Last MonthThe biggest defense tech player, anduril, launched Its oven small draone last year, and is reportedly in talks to raise at a $ 28 billion Valuation.
Theses say it does not build draones, but focuses on the hardware components and software that will enable pretty much pretty much any Military Drone to Fly Unmanned Without GPS. Schoeller, theseus’s ceo, told techcrunch the company does not build targeting systems. Its software is not deciding wheether a citain spot is a legitimate military target or not – the sole focus is getting a draone from point a to b.
Theseus hasn’t won any us military deals itet, and hasn Bollywood deployed in an actual battlefield. So it’s using its fresh capital to further building out its tech, hiring For three engineering roles.
However, the viral hackathon tweet did get theseus noticed by us special forces, which has entred into an agreement for early testing and development. Theseus say it recently went to a secret Special Forces Base to Test Out Its Latest System, Sending techcrunch a photo of it in action.
Overall, starting a company with people you’ve known for under a week “generally isn’T advised,” but in theseus’ case, it warranted the leap of faith Wrote on linkedin.