Munich's SE3 lands $30m Accel-led Series A for drone software that keeps working when GPS is jammed

SE3, a Munich defence-tech company that writes spatial AI for drones and ground vehicles, has closed a $30m Series A round, with Accel as lead investor. Keen Venture Partners joined as a new backer, and seed investors Lakestar and Seedcamp put in more money.

The size and speed of the round stand out. SE3 left stealth only in June with a €5.5m seed, so the company has raised roughly five times that amount in about five months. It is one more sign that European investors are writing large cheques for defence software that can run on someone else's hardware.

Software that sits on other people's drones

The company does not build aircraft or vehicles. Its software takes the sensor feeds from drones and ground robots made by different manufacturers and merges them into a single live 3D model of the terrain. From that model it coordinates the whole group, deciding routes, positions and behaviour for each machine, while a human operator gives instructions by voice.

Everything runs on the devices themselves rather than in the cloud. That design choice is aimed at the front line in Ukraine, where electronic warfare routinely knocks out satellite navigation and a handful of operators may be responsible for dozens of vehicles. SE3 says its system keeps navigating when GNSS signals are gone.

The company says it is already deployed in Ukraine and is working on several contracts there and with Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr. By its own count, thousands of units running its software have been delivered within two years. It has not disclosed revenue, order volumes or its valuation, and the shipment figure has not been independently confirmed.

Partners are a big part of the pitch. In June SE3 signed a strategic partnership with HENSOLDT to bring its spatial and agentic AI into the German prime's multi-domain operations platform. It also works with the scale-ups Auterion and ERC System, and its code runs on Skynode, Auterion's onboard computer.

“Autonomy only counts if it holds up when satellite navigation is jammed and one operator is responsible for many vehicles,” said Lorenz Meier, Auterion's chief executive.

A lab spin-out betting on open standards

The business came out of the computer vision and AI chair at the Technical University of Munich, led by Professor Daniel Cremers. Cremers, a winner of the Leibniz Prize, is a co-founder and serves as chief science officer. Chief executive Lukas Köstler and chief technology officer Simon Klenk both did their PhDs in his group; Köstler also worked on 3D vision at Tesla before starting the company. SE3 has staff in Munich, Berlin, London and Ukraine.

The company has positioned itself as vendor-neutral, and procurement rules are moving its way. Frameworks such as the Modular Open Systems Approach in the US and its German counterpart, MOSABw, push armed forces to mix kit from several suppliers. That favours a software layer that plugs into many platforms and does not compete with the manufacturers selling them.

Accel partner Matt Robinson pointed to the depth of the research team behind SE3. He said it was building spatial AI for autonomous systems, “something defence primes have found so difficult to do.”

“Working in defence means our technology has to deliver under pressure in the field,” Köstler said.

Where the $30m goes

Most of the money will go on hiring engineering, commercial and operations staff so it can take on more contracts. It is opening an office in the UK and building up its presence in Germany and Ukraine, with other European markets to follow.

Defence remains the core business. From 2027 the company wants to offer the same spatial layer for civilian uses, including robotics and emergency response, where machines also have to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings.

The timing fits a wider push. The EU wants to mobilise up to €800bn for defence by 2030 and is planning a so-called drone wall along its eastern border. Funding has followed: Munich neighbour Helsing has raised $1.8bn and builds its own AI for drones and targeting.

That also means SE3 is not alone. Helsing develops autonomy in-house, Anduril sells its Lattice software and Shield AI offers Hivemind for autonomous swarms in the US. Even partner Auterion is adding autonomy features of its own, which could narrow the space for an independent supplier.

The harder constraint may be buyers rather than investors. A recent handbook for dual-use founders argued that Europe's defence start-ups are short of government customers more than of investors, and that procurement is still slow. For SE3, the next test is whether its Bundeswehr and Ukraine work turns into larger, repeat orders that justify a round of this size.