Last week, we said that Overland AI keeps notching wins, and they just keep coming.
Yesterday, the Seattle-based ground autonomy startup announced a fresh $100M funding round led by 8VC, which the company says will help boost production of its autonomous ground vehicles. The new round brings Overland’s total funding to $142M.
Remember what we said above about things really not chilling out in 2026? Yeah, we weren’t kidding.
Speed RACER: Overland AI has had its robo-foot on the gas since its founding team of University of Washington researchers spun the company out of DARPA’s vehicle autonomy program in 2022.
In terms of UGVs and ground autonomy, Overland’s rolled out:
- ULTRA: A fully autonomous tactical UGV with a payload-agnostic deck. Basically, a big ol’ autonomous quad bike (without a seat, of course).
- OverDrive: An autonomy stack that enables vehicles to perceive and map terrain with active and passive on-board sensors without GPS or pre-planned routes.
- OverWatch: Command-and-control interface designed to let operators coordinate fleets of UGVs, re-task vehicles, and deploy payloads.
- SPARK: An autonomy “upfit kit” that runs through OverDrive and can plug and play into pretty much any ground vehicle to turn it into a drone.
Driverless dollars: That tech has caught the US military’s attention, and the company says they work with the Marines, Special Operations Command, and the Army. The latter has been particularly hot on them.
To date, Overland’s won:
- An $18.6M contract with DIU and the Army for the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program in 2024.
- A contract under the Army’s Unmanned Systems (UxS) Autonomy program to integrate its autonomy stack onto Infantry Squad Vehicles (ISVs) last August.
- And a $2M contract last week to supply ULTRAs to the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division after winning the xTechOverwatch competition.
“For the US to stay ahead in ground robotics, there needs to be more autonomous ground vehicles, and that’s what this raise is going to allow us to provide,” Overland AI co-founder and president Stephanie Bonk told Tectonic. “We’ve been seeing rapidly increasing demand for our technology because the platform autonomy is so advanced, so this felt like the right time.”
Production push: More specifically, Overland AI is planning to put that $100M towards “expanding our manufacturing capacity and growing our customer-facing teams,” Bonk said. “This [raise] is going to enable us to double our manufacturing capacity” for ULTRAs.
While ULTRA is Overland’s flagship product, it’s primarily “important because it allows people to start using autonomous ground vehicles immediately,” she added, “but there’s always going to be requests from the military to put this tech onto other vehicles, things that they already sustain, so our SPARK kit is still a vital part of our offering.”
Given that the Army’s appetite for autonomy isn’t looking like it’s going away anytime soon, $100M in fresh funding should help Overland put things into overdrive.