On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey poster On X that he and two others, he had just met, built a cheap drone to a hackathon that calculated his contact details simply using his camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha le.VY and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under 25.
Technology had a clear potential to combat GPS fog crawling drones in Ukraine. Instead of GPS, drone operators must use high -tech glasses to guide their drones in view. But that leads to a lot of problems, especially in poor conditions such as thick fog or at night.
At the end of the hackathon, Schoeller wished his two teammates and separated, hoping that their paths could cross again.
But the tweet has become viral and changed their lives. A day later, the three decided to apply each other in Combinator, successfully entering his Spring 2024 cohort.
Now, their company based in San Francisco, CESUShas just raised $ 4.3 million in seed financing in a round led by the first round, with additional support from Y combinator and Lux Capital, he told Techcrunch exclusively.
Theseus joins a herd of other drone -related startups. There is Skydio, which focuses on the replacement of Chinese drones for American lawsuits and was lastly evaluated at 2.2 billion dollars in 2023. Shield AI, which built recognition drones, recently collected an evaluation of $ 5.3 billion. The biggest player in defense technology, Andundil, spear His own little drone last year, and would be in talks to increase an assessment of $ 28 billion.
Thésée says that it does not build drones, but focuses on hardware components and software that will allow all military drones to fly without pilot without GPS. Schoeller, CEO of Theseus, told Techcrunch that the company did not build targeting systems. Its software does not decide whether a certain place is a legitimate or not military target – the only objective is to obtain a drone from point A to B.
Thésée has not yet won American military transactions and has not been deployed on a real battlefield. He therefore uses his new capital to focus on building its technology, hiring For three engineering roles.
However, the viral hackathon tweet pointed out these American special forces, which concluded an agreement for early tests and development. Thésée says he recently went to a secret base of special forces to test his latest system, sending Techcrunch a photo in action.
Overall, the start of a business with people you have known for less than a week “is generally not informed”, but in the case of Theseus, this justified the jump of faith, Schoeller wrote On LinkedIn.
