Who is funding SE3?
SE3, a Munich startup that builds spatial intelligence software for autonomous systems, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Accel. Keen, Lakestar, and Seedcamp also took part in the round. It arrives just five months after SE3 emerged from stealth with a €5.5 million seed.
What does SE3's software do?
The company starts from a gap it sees in current artificial intelligence. AI can automate large amounts of knowledge work, but it still struggles to understand three dimensions. SE3's platform-agnostic software sits between raw sensor data and action. It connects drones and ground vehicles from different manufacturers and fuses what they see into a shared 3D picture of the environment.
From that picture, the software runs the swarm. It optimizes each system's behavior, routes, and positions based on the terrain. Operators command everything by voice. The software runs on the edge, meaning on the devices themselves, which matters in the environments SE3 targets. Those are contested areas where electronic warfare jams satellite navigation.
Where is SE3's technology being used?
Those environments are not hypothetical for the company. SE3 is already deployed in Ukraine and works on multiple contracts there, as well as with Germany's Bundeswehr. The company says it has shipped thousands of systems in the past two years. Its partners include defense prime HENSOLDT and the scale-ups Auterion and ERC System. SE3's software runs on Auterion's Skynode computers.
The company's timing lines up with a shift in European procurement. Buyers are moving toward modularity and interoperability through frameworks such as the Modular Open Systems Approach and Germany's MOSABw program. Those frameworks favor independent software that works across manufacturers without competing with them. The Netherlands made a similar bet when it backed Intelic's single command system for mixed drone fleets.
SE3 spun out of the computer vision lab led by Professor Daniel Cremers at the Technical University of Munich. Co-founders Lukas Köstler and Simon Klenk were pursuing PhDs there at the time. Cremers now serves as the company's chief science officer. He holds TUM's chair for computer vision and AI and won the Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious research award.
“Working in defense means our technology has to deliver under pressure in the field,” said Köstler, SE3's CEO.
The funding comes at a time of heavy spending. The European Union aims to mobilize €800 billion in defense spending by 2030 and is planning a drone wall along its eastern flank. That wave of capital has already produced a €12 billion valuation for Helsing. Stark rose from its founding to a €3.5 billion valuation in two years.
Matt Robinson, who works at Accel, argues that SE3 is tackling the layer that “defense primes have found so difficult to do.” Accel led the round on that thesis.
SE3 plans to put the new money into engineering, commercial, and operations hires. It will also open a UK office and expand its presence in Germany and Ukraine.
Defense remains the company's focus for now. From 2027, SE3 plans to bring the same spatial layer into robotics, emergency response, and other settings where machines have to cope with the unpredictable.
Este artigo foi escrito com a assistência de IA.
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