On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey published on X that he and two others he had just met he built an economic drone in a hackathon that calculated his coordinates simply using his camera and Google maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha LANDVy and Carl Schoeller, they were all engineers under the age of 25.
Technology had a clear potential to fight the rampant GPS cap of drones in Ukraine. Instead of GPS, drones operators must use high -tech glasses to guide their visible drones. But this leads to many problems, especially in bad condition such as thick fog or at night.
At the end of the Hackathon, Schoeller wished his two teammates well, hoping that their paths could cross again.
But the tweet became viral and changed life. The next day, the three decided to apply for Y Combinator, successfully entering his 2024 spring cohort.
Now, their company based in San Francisco, Teseo, has just collected $ 4.3 million in Seed funding in a round guided by First Round Capital, with further support of Y Combinator and Lux Capital, he said exclusively at Techcrunch.
Teseo joins a flock of other startups related to drones. There is Skydio, which focuses on the replacement of Chinese drones for the US law enforcement agencies and was the last time at $ 2.2 billion in 2023. Shield AI, which builds reconnaissance drones, recently collected with an evaluation of $ 5.3 billion. The greatest technological player of the defense, Andril, launched his small drone last year and according to what reports is in talks to collect with an evaluation of $ 28 billion.
Teseo says that he does not build drones, but focuses on the components and the hardware software that will allow practically any military drone to fly without pilot without GPS. Schoeller, CEO of Teseo, told Techcrunch that the company does not build targeting systems. Its software is not deciding whether a certain point is a legitimate military objective or not: the only goal is to obtain a drone from point A to B.
Teseo has not yet won US military affairs and has not been deployed in a real battlefield. So he is using his new capital to focus on the construction of his technology, taking on three engineering roles.
However, the Viral Hackathon tweet noticed Teseo special forces from us, who entered into an agreement for the first tests and development. Teseo says that he recently went to a secret base of the special forces to test his latest system, sending a photo to Action to Techcrunch.
Overall, start a company with people you knew less a week “generally is not recommended”, but in the case of Theseus, he justified the leap of the faith, Schoeller wrote on LinkedIn.
