Stendr secures $5.4M in early seed funding to develop AI drone tracking technology

Norwegian defense technology startup Stendr said today it closed on $5.4 million in pre-seed funding to provide advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for modern weapons systems.

This round, one of the largest growth investments in the history of Nordic security, was led by Rainfall, ACME and Skyfall, with the participation of Startup Lab, Antler and a number of angel investors.

Stendr is led by Chief Executive Officer Aleksander Leonard Larsen (pictured), who previously helped found Sky Mavis Inc., the developer of the blockchain-based game “Axie Infinity.” After growing that game into a $3 billion ecosystem, Larsen is now turning his attention from digital assets to homeland security.

With Stendr, he said he is trying to build a “basic technology stack” for a new “Nordic defense prime”. Essentially, it is a vertically integrated hardware and software company focused on AI-powered warfare.

The first order of business is to protect the drone. Recent conflicts in Ukraine and Iran have shown that traditional air defense systems are insufficient against autonomous drones and manned drones. They are designed to intercept multi-million dollar aircraft and hypersonic missiles, rather than a bunch of cheap plastic drones that are often too small for those systems to track.

“The nature of warfare has changed,” explained Larsen. “Drones are cheap, autonomous and ubiquitous. Defense systems built in the past can’t keep up with the speed. At Stendr, we’re building the technology to find them, track them and provide intelligence to defenders to operate, completely autonomously in Europe.”

Stendr’s native AI platform will manage hardware and software as a single, unified platform. Instead of trying to incorporate AI into existing weapons systems, it will design an entirely new drone defense system, focusing on multisensor technology embedded in cost-effective hardware. The idea is to be able to detect, track and provide actionable intelligence on drone threats in real time.

Over time, Stendr’s ambitions extend beyond defense against drones. It said its goal is to give members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization access to a “Nordic alternative” that can deliver new systems in a fraction of the time it takes traditional defense contractors to come up with.

Photo: Stendr