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 Lévy 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.
At the end of the hackathon, Schoeller wished his two teammates 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, 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 reconnaissance drones, raised at a $5.3 billion valuation last month. The biggest defense tech player, Anduril, launched its own small drone last year, and is reportedly in talks to raise at a $28 billion valuation.
Theseus says it doesn’t build drones, but focuses on the hardware components and software that will enable pretty much any military drone to fly unmanned without GPS. Schoeller, Theseus’s CEO, told TechCrunch the company doesn’t build targeting systems. Its software is not deciding whether a certain spot is a legitimate military target or not — the sole focus is getting a drone from point A to B.
Theseus hasn’t won any U.S. military deals yet, and hasn’t been deployed in an actual battlefield. So it’s using its fresh capital to focus on further building out its tech, hiring for three engineering roles.
However, the viral hackathon tweet did get Theseus noticed by U.S. Special Forces, which has entered into an agreement for early testing and development. Theseus says 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, Theseus CEO Carl Schoeller wrote on LinkedIn.
