Remember when Y Combinator startups made food delivery and crypto apps? Well, times they have a-changed.
This week, a new startup called Seeing Systems emerged out of the famed accelerator’s 2026 winter cohort, and they’re definitely not making widgets. The UK-based team—founded by two brothers—is building autonomous strike drones, and they’re already seeing early traction with the UK Ministry of Defence and others.
AI notetaking startups, begone. Hard tech is so back.
Seeing clearly: Seeing Systems—led by brothers Alex, who previously built Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) training hardware, and Matthew Le Maitre, an ex-Jane Street software engineer—originally set out to build autonomous search-and-rescue drones, but the death of Alex’s close colleague in Ukraine changed that.
“His passing made it clear to me that not enough was being done to build the capabilities we actually need to field as an effective defense force, and I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore,” Alex told Tectonic. “That was a defining moment for Seeing Systems and made us switch gears. If we are to deter more conflicts, we actually need capabilities that match our adversaries.”
Switch and strike: So, they pivoted to building super-modular strike drones (their latest is called Banshee) and the agentic autonomy software that powers them.
- Their low-cost drones are built around a core airframe with swappable components (sensors, payloads, comms links, etc.) to make them as future-proofed and adaptable to changing threats and missions as possible.
- They’ve moved much of the processing from the drone to the controller, where their in-house agentic AI system “interprets data the way a human teammate would, assisting with everything from flight control to point-of-interest identification,” according to Alex, and “users can use human language to interact with our control system.”
- They’re keeping performance specs under wraps, but said that they’ve “validated the setup on some systems out to as far as 50km” and that their “current manufacturing capacity is north of 5,000 units per month, using our manufacturing partner.”
Friends with benefits: That tech has caught the attention of the UK Ministry of Defence and others. So far, Seeing Systems’ customers and partners include the Royal Marine Commandos and other British military units, as well as four other NATO forces. They’re currently shipping prototypes to Ukraine for testing and feedback.
“A lot of engagement started from us proactively engaging with people we knew, and then that just grew as the interest grew,” Alex told Tectonic. “We’re proud to have a large number of friends who have chosen to give service to their country, and this provided us an initial foot in the door.”
Self-starters: Notably, the brothers haven’t raised any capital from investors to scale their platform. Instead, Alex said, they’ve “bootstrapped [themselves] until this point, and [have] been lucky enough to get some early revenue from the UK military, which has prevented [them] from being capital-bound early on.”
That, among other things (like delivering bombs, not burritos), sets them apart from other startups in their YC cohort.
“Being a hard tech company in a batch of mostly software companies does make things a little jarring at times,” Alex said. “Often, our batchmates will have pivoted two or three times, and that’s just not an option for us. We can wiggle a bit, but we’re on this general track for the long run.”
Next steps: Launching out of YC with customer traction, a product, and manufacturing capacity is about as hot a start as it gets, and Seeing Systems isn’t planning on slowing down.
“We’ve got some plans in motion that will build up our presence in other countries to better service their needs,” Alex said. “At the same time, we’re building out our current offering and finishing off some of the tech we have in the works.”
And they’re aiming pretty high, in a characteristically British sort of way: “Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather and better banter.”
Watch out, y’all. The British are coming.