Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet | TechCrunch
On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he'd just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Levy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25. The tech had clear potential to combat rampant GPS jamming of drones in Ukraine. Instead 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. Now, their San Francisco-based company, Theseus, has just raised $4.3 million in seed funding in a round led by First Round Capital, with additional backing from Y Combinator and Lux Capital, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Theseus joins a flock of other drone-related startups. There's Skydio, which focuses on replacing Chinese drones for U.S. law enforcement and was last valued at $2.2 billion in 2023. Shield AI, which builds...
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