Swarm Aero, a developer of large, uncrewed aerial vehicle swarms, which recently announced that it is building a manufacturing facility in Fayetteville, on Wednesday announced a $35 million Series A financing round.
The infusion of capital is led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures with participation from Swarm seed investors Khosla Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Construct Capital, Coatue, Founders Fund, Alumni Ventures and MaC Venture Capital. The funding news follows the company’s recent ribbon-cutting at a new 80,000 square foot Advanced Manufacturing Center at Drake Field in Fayetteville.
Swarm, headquartered in Oxnard, California, is using its total capital raised of $59 million to accelerate the development and deployment of the company’s large UAV and the swarm software that enables drones to be controlled at scale.
“Aircraft are the plurality of defense purchases and large UAVs are the future of air power,” said Danny Goodman, CEO and cofounder of Swarm. “When paired with our command and control software, Swarm’s large UAVs can achieve major combat objectives by cooperating with superhuman dexterity while being several times cheaper than traditional aircraft. This is one of the most consequential developments in modern conflict and we have built an exceptionally talented engineering team to bring this vision to life. This new round of funding will allow us to significantly grow our team and bring the largest swarming aircraft ever built to market.”
The advent of drone warfare opens up an opportunity to reverse the trend of manned combat aircraft growing increasingly expensive to produce each year, according to a press release. Swarm’s “large, multimission ” UAV introduces a new category of aircraft that includes both sense and strike capabilities. It is designed to take off safely and cross long distances to reach the fight. Large UAVs also have a capacity that small drones lack, enabling them to defeat “high value targets and have an asymmetric impact.”
Swarm’s approach allows a single team to have command and control over thousands of UAVs at a time, as opposed to the current remotely piloted aircraft approach, which pairs up to four humans with a single UAV.
The company’s command-and-control software, Legion, solves this problem by allowing operators to express mission objectives and have Legion translate them into commands for large numbers of robotic systems in the air, on the ground or at sea. Legion has already enabled a single operator to control dozens of live assets in complex operations.
Swarm, founded in 2022 and based in Oxnard, California, has designed and built more than 30 novel aircraft and deployed software with a combined 4.6 billion active users worldwide.
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