Exclusive: SE3, a German startup building ‘spatial intelligence’ for military drones, gets $30 million in Series A funding
SE3, a Munich-based startup that makes AI software to help drones and other unmanned military systems understand the three-dimensional world around them, has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Accel.
Key points
- As a German company, SE3 is bound by strict export laws, Köstler noted: “It’s really the elected parliament that decides in the end what we will do.” SE3 serves European NATO members and their allies.
- It comes less than five months after the company, which recently dropped “Labs” from its name, emerged from stealth with €5.5 million ($6.1 million) in seed funding.
- Köstler, who previously worked on Tesla’s Autopilot team and at Nvidia Research, said the most basic capability—drones locating themselves without GPS—has been delivered thousands of times and is “very robust.” But he said the high-level fleet command AI is less mature.
SE3’s software takes video and sensor feeds from multiple drones and ground vehicles and fuses them into a single 3D picture of the battlefield—”like a mini map, how you would know it from a strategy game,” cofounder and CEO Lukas Köstler told Fortune.
Additional details
- SE3 has contracts with Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, to develop it and has demonstrated it with them, but “there’s still much that needs to be built out over the next one or two years,” he said.
- Military work has long made some AI researchers uneasy—a tension highlighted when the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in March after it refused to let its models be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
- SE3 spun out of the computer vision lab of Daniel Cremers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where Köstler and SE3’s CTO, Simon Klenk, were PhD students.
- Rather than remotely piloting a drone with a joystick or having to tap away on a tablet, a soldier can simply say, “I need reconnaissance two kilometers in the north over the forest,” Köstler said, and a suitable drone would take off, fly the mission, and report back.
- Instead, it uses classical computer vision algorithms to distill vast amounts of sensor data into a database a language model can query, and gives the model a harness equipped with a variety of conventional software tools the model can call.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.