On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and the other two he would just meet built a free drone in a hackathon that calculated his coordinates simply using his camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, saocha lANDVy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25.
Technology had a clear potential to combat the rampant GPS blockage of the drone in Ukraine. Instead of GPS, drone operators should use high -tech glasses to guide their drones from vision. But this leads to many problems, especially in poor conditions such as thick fog or night.
At the end of Hackathon, Schoeller congratulated his two teammates well and split, hoping their paths could cross again.
But the tweet went viral and changed their lives. A day later, the three decided to apply to Y Combinator, successfully entering his Spring 2024 group.
Now, their company based in San Francisco, Theusus, has just raised $ 4.3 million in seed funds in a round led by first round capital, with additional support from Y Combinator and Lux Capital, exclusively told Techcrunch.
Theseus joins a herd of other drone -related beginnings. There is Skydio, who focuses on replacing Chinese drones for US law enforcement and was last valued at $ 2.2 billion in 2023. Shield AI, who builds discovery drones, raised with a $ 5.3 billion rating last month. The biggest defense technology player, Anduril, launched his little drone last year, and is reported to be in talks to raise a $ 28 billion rating.
Theseus says he does not build drone, but focuses on the hardware components and the software that will enable any military drone to fly without a pilot without GPS. Schoeller, Director General of Theseus, told Techcrunch that the company does not build target systems. His software is not deciding whether a particular place is a legitimate military objective or not – the only concentration is taking a drone from point A to B.
Theseus has not yet won any US military agreement and has not settled in a current battlefield. So it is using its fresh capital to focus on further building its technology, hiring three engineering roles.
However, the Viral Hackathon Tweet noticed the Theus from the US Special Forces, which has entered into an early test and development agreement. Theseus says he recently went to a secret special forces base to try its latest system, sending Techcrunch a photo of him in action.
In general, the beginning of a company with people you have known for under a week “generally not advised”, but in the case of theseus, it guaranteed the dance of faith, CEO wrote these Carl Schoeller in LinkedIn.
