Shield AI, a San Diego, CA-based defense technology company developing AI and self-driving technologies for aircraft, raised $210M in Series D equity financing, increasing its valuation past the billion-dollar mark.
The round was led by Disruptive, with participation from multiple top tier venture funds, including Point72 Ventures, which led Shield AI’s Series C. The management team projects an additional $75M in debt and $15M in equity to be secured in the coming weeks, bringing the total Series D proceeds to $300M.
The company intends to use the funds to enable Shield AI and its recently acquired companies, Heron Systems and Martin UAV, to accelerate their plans for growth across the defense and commercial industries.
Led by co-founder and CEO Ryan Tseng, and CTO Nate Michael, Shield AI provides Hivemind®, a self-driving autonomy stack for military and commercial aircraft, designed from the ground up to be multi-role, multi-vehicle. It employs state of the art algorithms for planning, mapping, and state-estimation to enable aircraft to execute dynamic flight maneuvers and utilizes reinforcement learning for discovery, learning, and execution of winning tactics and strategies. On aircraft, Hivemind® enables full autonomy and is designed to run fully on the edge in high threat, GPS and communication degraded environments.
Shield AI’s hardware products include the Nova and V-BAT UAS. Hivemind® is integrated onboard the Nova and will be integrated onboard the V-BAT UAS. Shield AI is committed to supporting third party aircraft with autonomy solutions.
FinSMEs
25/08/2021