Coordinating a swarm of drones to operate as a single force is one of the harder problems in modern unmanned warfare, but it’s that exact problem that Oslo-based Six Robotics is setting out solve.
Six Robotics builds software, called Valkyrie, that lets a single operator command multiple drones as one coordinated team rather than flying each of them separately, handling the mission planning and real-time decision-making needed to keep them working together in contested or degraded conditions — environments where GPS and communications links can’t be relied on.
The company this week announced a €12 million seed round of funding to accelerate development of Valkyrie, expand deployments across European and allied defence markets, and grow its team. The round is led by DTCP, a Hamburg-based growth equity investment firm, through its DTCP Defence fund, with Denmark’s state-owned EIFO and Copenhagen VC firm Scale Capital also participating. DTCP Defence is the vehicle behind Project Liberty, the €500 million fund DTCP launched in January dedicated exclusively to European defence, security and resilience technology.
It’s a sizeable cheque for a seed round, though it makes more sense given what Six Robotics already has to show for itself: a platform built in collaboration with the Norwegian Armed Forces and FFI (the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment) and a team of almost 90 people, all built before taking any outside money.
For Christian Fredrik Eggesbø, the company’s CEO and founder, that head start is the reason to bring in institutional money now — to accelerate something that already has meaningful traction. More specifically, he sees “collaborative autonomy” as central to the next decade of defence, and makes the case for building it as a matter of European self-reliance.
“Europe cannot afford to depend on others for the software that defines what its forces can do,” Eggesbø said in a statement.
Selling coordination and interoperability
Much of the drone industry’s best-known autonomy software comes from companies that also build the hardware it runs on. Anduril’s Lattice platform, for instance, is developed primarily around Anduril’s own aircraft and ground systems, part of a wider push toward vertically integrated manufacturing. That structure gives a company tighter control over its own stack, but it also tends to keep the software within one manufacturer’s fleet. Six Robotics doesn’t build drones itself, so its pitch runs the other way: sell autonomy that works across whichever hardware a defence customer already operates, rather than asking them to standardise on one supplier.
Ole Aguirre, partner at DTCP Defence, says the fund backed Six Robotics this early because few teams can credibly tackle a problem this hard.
“Software-defined autonomy and swarming at scale are among the most technically challenging areas in modern defence,” Aguirre said. “Their software-first approach enables interoperability across platforms while giving defence organisations greater operational flexibility.”
In November, Six Robotics announced plans to integrate Valkyrie into FACNAV, the command-and-control software made by fellow Norwegian company Teleplan Globe and already used by Norwegian and allied forces. That deal speaks to the military buyer’s problem: an armed force assembling a fleet from several manufacturers needs a coordination layer that works regardless of which one built the airframe.
And then in March, Six Robotics signed a separate deal with Berlin-based Stark to integrate Valkyrie’s swarm-coordination software with Stark’s kamikaze drones for “recce-strike” missions, pairing reconnaissance with the ability to strike a target through a single connected system. Stark already builds its own autonomous systems, so the partnership reflects two specialists dividing a hard problem between them: Stark’s expertise is munitions, Six Robotics’ is swarm coordination, and integrating was faster than either firm duplicating the other’s work.
It’s not just startups making this bet, either. The Dutch Ministry of Defence has just signed a multi-year deal with defence software company Intelic, committing its future drone procurement to Intelic’s NEXUS command-and-control platform before it has even chosen which drones to buy. It’s the same wager as Six Robotics’: build the coordination layer first, and let the hardware plug into it later.
Eggesbø said that Six Robotics has grown from five employees to almost 90 on friends-and-family funding alone since its formation in 2023, and with its first institutional funding in place, it’s well financed to accelerate its next phase, which includes setting up operations in Denmark later in 2026.
“Now, for the first time, we have the backing to match our ambitions,” he said.
