SE3 raises $30m Series A led by Accel

SE3 has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Accel, with Keen, Lakestar and Seedcamp also participating. The Munich-founded company is pitching its software as a hardware-neutral spatial layer for drones and ground vehicles, a position aimed at European defence customers operating mixed fleets and, according to SE3, environments where satellite navigation is disrupted.

The SE3 Series A funding, announced November 12, follows a €5.5 million seed round less than five months earlier, Fortune reported. SE3 did not state a valuation in the available reports, and the reports also do not provide revenue or contract values.

SE3 says it will use the capital to hire in engineering, commercial and operations roles, reinforce its work in Germany and Ukraine, open a UK office and expand elsewhere in Europe. Fortune reported that the company plans to grow from about 40 employees to about 120, with prospective offices in London, Berlin, the Nordics and Baltics, and Poland.

What does SE3's spatial AI software do?

SE3 says its software combines video and other sensor feeds from unmanned aircraft and ground vehicles made by different manufacturers into one three-dimensional view of an operating area. The company says operators can issue voice commands and that its platform can support route planning, object detection and coordination among multiple drones.

The software is intended to support operations when GPS is jammed or unavailable. SE3 says it runs on edge devices, rather than requiring a cloud connection. In reporting by Fortune, chief executive Lukas Köstler said the company does not use a general-purpose language model to interpret raw sensor data. Instead, it processes the data with computer-vision systems and uses conventional software tools, including planning algorithms, for tasks such as calculating a flight path.

That technical distinction also sets a limit on what is currently deployed. Köstler told Fortune that GPS-independent localisation had been delivered thousands of times, while the higher-level AI for commanding fleets remained less mature and would need further development over the next one to two years.

SE3 says it has shipped thousands of systems in the past two years, is deployed in Ukraine and is working on multiple contracts with Ukraine and Germany's Bundeswehr. Those operational, shipment and contract claims come from the company. Köstler told Fortune that SE3 has Bundeswehr contracts related to developing and demonstrating fleet-command AI, as well as contracts in Ukraine where its technology is deployed.

The company was founded by Köstler, CTO Simon Klenk and chief science officer Daniel Cremers. It spun out of Cremers' computer-vision laboratory at the Technical University of Munich, where Köstler and Klenk were doctoral students. SE3 says defence will remain its immediate focus, though it plans to explore civilian uses, including robotics and emergency response, from 2027.

This story draws on original reporting from Sifted.