Theseus was founded in 2024 by Ian Laffey, Sacha Levy, and Carl Schoeller, and is based in San Francisco. The company's origin is now a defense-tech legend: in February 2024 the founders built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its own coordinates using only a camera and Google Maps imagery, with all three engineers under the age of 25. A tweet showing the demo went viral, and within days the team applied to Y Combinator and was accepted into its 2024 cohort.
The problem Theseus tackles is one of the most urgent in modern warfare: GPS jamming and spoofing. Adversaries can deny or corrupt satellite navigation signals across large areas, rendering drones and precision systems that rely on GPS unreliable or useless. Theseus's software provides an alternative by using computer vision to match what the drone's camera sees against reference map data, deriving accurate position and heading without any satellite signal.
This vision-based, GPS-independent navigation can be integrated onto a wide range of uncrewed aircraft, giving them resilience in contested electromagnetic environments. The capability is directly relevant to reconnaissance, strike, and logistics drones operating where GPS cannot be trusted, and the company has worked with the U.S. Special Operations community as an early adopter.
Theseus raised a $4.3M seed round that closed in April 2025, led by First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator and Lux Capital. As an early-stage company, it is focused on hardening its navigation software and expanding deployments with defense customers who urgently need alternatives to vulnerable satellite navigation.