Tampa, Florida – British startup Mutable Tactics has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI software that enables groups of military drones to operate autonomously even when satellite navigation and communications are disrupted.
The funding round was led by Seraphim Space, which sees the technology as strengthening the flexibility of space-enabled capabilities on which its investments often rely.
“Space utilizes PNT (position, navigation and timing) and communications, offering superior performance when the system is available,” Seraphim Space Investment Principal Maureen Haverty said via email.
“But then it brilliantly switches to space-degraded mode, which allows the drones to continue working as a team when space connectivity is not available. We are supporting this as space investors because we think it eliminates the need for the backup manual options that we see in the market.”
Haverty declined to comment on how the system coordinates operations without communications, but said, “The entire architecture is built from the ground up to work within that communications-denied paradigm. Communications-denied is not a bolt-on like we see elsewhere.”
Mutable Tactics, founded in August 2024 by former British Army officer Colin MacLeod and robotics AI expert Enrique Munoz de Cote, plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team and accelerate software development for a range of unmanned systems, including aerial, maritime and ground drones.
The company said it is working with two European governments to validate the technology under real operating conditions, while also working with unmanned systems partners and preparing for live demonstrations in demanding environments.
McLeod served in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he said he saw firsthand how technology can succeed or fail under pressure.
“Increasingly, the bottleneck is no longer hardware but human attention,” he said.
“We can deploy more drones than ever before, yet we ask operators to control them one by one, often in environments where communications are unreliable. True autonomy breaks that one-to-one link, allowing humans to monitor and direct teams of systems rather than individual machines.
“This change is necessary to support modern military missions, where scale, speed and flexibility matter, and where operators must focus on intent and results rather than manual control.”
The UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund also participated in the funding round along with investment firms Coro, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose.
