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

Ian Laffey, Sacha Lévy, and Carl Schoeller built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated GPS coordinates using its camera and Google Maps instead of GPS signals. Their tweet about the project went viral, leading to their successful application to Y Combinator's Spring 2024 cohort. They formed Theseus in San Francisco, which recently raised $4.3 million in seed funding. Theseus focuses on hardware and software enabling drones to fly without GPS, catching the attention of U.S. Special Forces for early testing.