autonomy
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The Venture Fund Where the Partners Used to Run the Missions
New North Ventures backs founders building for both the Pentagon and the marketplace - a dual-use bet led by former intelligence operators and the entrepreneur who built Dyn.
Avea Robotics
Avea Robotics builds Sentinel, ultra-low-latency software that lets a human operator step into a robot from anywhere in the world. When an autonomous robot gets stuck on an edge case, an operator teleoperates it back on track - keeping fleets running and capturing the intervention data that makes the next model better. Founded in 2026 by UIUC engineers Ary Indarapu and Vikram Vadrevu and backed by Y Combinator (P26), the company reports roughly $18K MRR and has helped deploy close to 30 robots.
Surtr Defense Systems
Surtr Defense Systems builds ParallaxOS, a hardware-agnostic operating system for drone defense. It ingests data from any radar, RF detector, camera, or acoustic array, fuses it into a single common operating picture, applies AI threat classification, and passes human-authorized engagement recommendations to any effector. Founded in 2026 by two former Shield AI and Anduril autonomy engineers, the company is a Y Combinator Spring 2026 (P26) startup that raised roughly $4.8M in seed funding and field-tested its system with Ukraine's Brave1 defense cluster.
Marakeb Technologies
Marakeb Technologies is a Sharjah-based UAE company specializing in platform-agnostic autonomy for marine, ground, and aerial vehicles. Its patented MAP Pro conversion kit turns almost any manned vehicle - from boats to cars to drones - into a remotely operated or fully autonomous system. With roots in GRP boat building since 2007, the company now builds unmanned surface vessels, ground control stations, and combat management systems for defense, security, oil and gas, environmental, and transportation customers, and is majority-owned by Tawazun's Strategic Development Fund.
Swarmer
Swarmer builds combat-proven, hardware-agnostic autonomy software that lets a single operator command hundreds of drones - across air, sea and ground - as one coordinated swarm. Born out of the war in Ukraine and founded in 2023, its STYX, MINAS and TRIDENT products translate human objectives into autonomous action while keeping people in control of life-or-death decisions. The company's software has supported more than 100,000 real-world combat missions, raised a record $15M Series A, and went public on the Nasdaq in 2026 under the ticker SWMR.
Roboto AI
Roboto AI is a Seattle-based analytics platform for robotics and Physical AI teams. It ingests multimodal robot logs - ROS bags, PX4/ULog, MCAP, Parquet, video - and uses AI agents plus a Python SDK and CLI to automatically search, analyze, and surface edge cases, anomalies, and failures across entire robot fleets. Founded in 2022 by former Amazon Robotics leaders Benji Barash and Yves Albers-Schoenberg, the company spun out of the Allen Institute for AI and raised a $4.8M seed to help robotics developers stop digging through petabytes of sensor data by hand.
General Radar Corp.
General Radar Corp. is a Menlo Park deep-tech company building high-resolution, software-defined phased-array (AESA) radar systems for aerospace, defense, wind energy, autonomy, and weather markets. Founded in 2016 by former NASA/JPL engineer Dmitry Turbiner, the company pairs a GaN AESA front-end with digital beam-forming and GPU supercomputing to deliver radars it says are dramatically higher resolution and roughly 20x cheaper than legacy aerospace radar - largely from commercial off-the-shelf parts. It raised a $22M Series A in 2022, bringing total funding to roughly $47.5M.
Zeromatter
Zeromatter builds the simulation infrastructure that autonomous-systems companies use to develop, test and validate their products before they ever touch the real world. Founded by former Tesla Autopilot simulation lead Ian Glow, its platform combines high-fidelity sensor simulation, automatic environment generation, multi-agent co-simulation frameworks, execution infrastructure and developer tooling into one system - aimed at making simulation a default tool for autonomy, aerospace, automotive, agriculture, drones and green energy.
Pickle Robot Company
Pickle Robot Company builds Physical AI systems that autonomously unload trucks, trailers, and import containers of non-palletized goods at human-scale or better. Founded in 2018 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Pickle pairs a multi-camera vision system with generative AI foundation models trained on millions of real warehouse data points, mounting a KUKA arm on a custom mobile base that drives into a trailer and clears it in roughly 90 minutes. The company is on a mission to automate inbound and outbound work at one million warehouse doors over the next decade.
TurbineOne
TurbineOne builds Mission-AI for the frontlines. Its flagship Frontline Perception System (FPS) puts machine learning directly on the sensor at the tactical edge - no cloud, no coding, no connectivity required - so warfighters can detect, identify, and act on threats in real time. Founded in 2021 by Navy veteran Ian Kalin and former Amazon engineer Matt Amacker, the company is deployed across all branches of the U.S. military and reached a roughly $300M valuation with its 2025 Series B.