On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted to X that he and the other two he had just met had built a cheap drone on a hackathon, which used cameras and Google Maps to calculate coordinates. He and his colleagues Sacha Levi and Karl Schuler were all engineers under the age of 25.
The technology was clear that it could fight the ramp-stretched GPS jamming of Ukrainian drones. Instead of GPS, drone operators should use high-tech goggles to guide the drone in sight. But it leads to many problems, especially under conditions like thick fog and nighttime.
At the end of the hackathon, Scheller wanted his two teammates well, hoped they had broken up, and hoped their paths would cross again.
But the tweet went viral and changed my life. A day later, the three decided to apply for Y Combinator, and were successful in the spring 2024 cohort.
Now their San Francisco-based Theus has raised $4.3 million in seed funding in the first round, led by Capital, with additional support from Y Combinator and Lux Capital.
Theseus joins a pack of other drone-related startups. SkyDio focuses on the replacement of US law enforcement Chinese drones, valued at $2.2 billion in 2023. Shield AI, which builds reconnaissance drones, recently raised at a $5.3 billion valuation. The biggest defense engineer, Andrill, has reportedly been in discussions to launch his own small drone last year, raising it at a $28 billion valuation.
According to Thatus, drones will not be created, but the focus is on hardware components and software, allowing most military drones to fly unmanned without GPS. Schoeller, CEO of Theus, told TechCrunch that the company has not built a targeting system. The software does not determine whether a particular spot is a legitimate military target. The only focus is to get the drone from point A to B.
Theseus has yet to acquire US deals and has not been deployed to the real battlefield. So we focus on using the fresh capital and employing three engineering roles.
However, the virus hackathon tweets got Theseus, who was noticed by US special forces. Thattus says he recently went to a secret special forces base to test the latest system and actually sent out photos of TechCrunch.
Overall, starting a company with known people within a week “normally not advised” guaranteed a leap of faith in the case of Thatis, Schoeller wrote on LinkedIn.