SE3 raises $30M for military drone AI with battlefield mapping

The funding 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.

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, cofounder and CEO Lukas Köstler told Fortune. On top of that map sits a layer that labels objects and how they relate to one another, so soldiers can query it in plain language: how to reach a target without being seen or a good route for a heavy vehicle. Operators can also give commands the same way. Rather than remotely piloting a drone with a joystick, a soldier can say something like needing reconnaissance two kilometers north over a forest, and a suitable drone would take off, fly the mission, and report back, Köstler said.

In addition to this map-level understanding, SE3 also builds the AI systems that sit inside the drones or other unmanned systems, giving them the ability to maneuver and navigate, even in cases where GPS is jammed, detect objects, and act as a swarm with other drones. 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 the high-level fleet command AI is less mature.

SE3 has contracts with Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, to develop it and has demonstrated it with them, but Köstler said there is still much that needs to be built out over the next one or two years. The company also has contracts in Ukraine, where its technology is already deployed.

SE3 does not rely on general-purpose large language models to understand physics or terrain. 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. If the model needs a flight path, a conventional planning algorithm calculates one, avoiding mountains or enemy lines of sight. Simply feeding raw data to the model would not work at all, Köstler said.

Actions such as a drone takeoff can be set to require a human operator's approval. The system can run entirely offline, and customers can swap in their own preferred frontier AI model to act as the brains of the system.

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. Cremers serves as SE3's chief science officer.

As a German company, SE3 is bound by strict export laws, Köstler noted: the elected parliament decides in the end what the company will do. SE3 serves European NATO members and their allies.

SE3 is betting that militaries will want AI software that is not tied to any single hardware maker. If drone makers each control their own software stack, Köstler argued, customers struggle to get systems from different vendors to work together and, within two or three years, face costly lock-in.

SE3 counts sensor maker Hensoldt, drone software company Auterion, and drone developer ERC among its partners. Accel partner Matt Robinson said SE3's team was uniquely qualified to take on the challenge of building spatial AI for autonomous systems, something defense primes have found so difficult to do.

SE3 plans to use the money to grow from roughly 40 employees to about 120 and open offices in London, Berlin, the Nordics and Baltics, and Poland. Defense will drive revenue for at least the next 12 months, Köstler said, but a small team will begin exploring civilian robotics.