Mutable Tactics raises €1.8 million in a pre-seed fund to develop drone automation with AI

Mutable Tactics, a UK-based defense-tech startup, just raised €1.8 million in a pre-seed fund round to develop an AI software that enables drone team collaboration for autonomous operation and decision-making when communications are lost or unreliable.

This software will improve the military intents by closing the decision layer between the human operator and the robot, allowing drone deployment on one operator control system, even when direct input is not possible due to field constraints.  

The AI software will enable aerial, maritime, or ground drones to operate and make decisions by allowing them to collaborate and coordinate within drone teams, supervised and following the commanders’ instructions, rather than one-to-one constant input between operators and systems.

The software’s main goal is to close the decision-making and operations gap, guaranteeing effective functioning in modern conflict environments, like unavailable or unreliable communications with the operators, or GPS-denied environments. This shift will benefit modern military missions where operators must remain focused on intent and outcomes rather than manual control.

The round was led by the spacetech investor Seraphim Space, alongside the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Koro, Entrepreneurs First, and Transpose. The capital will be used by Mutable Tactics to expand its engineering team and accelerate the development of the software. 

Mutable Tactics was founded in 2024 by former British Army officer Colin MacLeod, and robotics AI specialist Enrique Muñoz de Cote to close the gap between the rapid development of the technology for defense systems, such as drones and robots, and humans’ abilities to operate them within real-life settings. 

Moreover,the company is collaborating with two key European governments to validate the development of this technology and integrate it with unmanned-system partners for live demonstrations, to support priority defense missions in real operational conditions.

However, the company believes that this technology will be key for autonomous systems to function in real-world settings, supporting the application for the next generations of robots and physical AI.