Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet
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.