Occam Industries, the British-Ukrainian defence software startup, has raised some more funding: a seed round of €3.8 million led by Denmark’s North Ventures, with participation also from Sparkmind and Grenadyr, as well original backers Antler, Tech Horizons, TYR.vc and Freedom Fund.
The funding follows on from a pre-seed round of €3 million announced earlier in 2026. This new funding takes Occam’s total funding to €7 million.
This seed round was quietly announced at the end of September with little fanfare. We understand the startup is gearing up now for a much larger Series A and some significant product news.
Occam develops hardware-agnostic autonomy software for military drones, designed to be capable of being implemented in retrofits. It enables manufacturers and operators to complete missions autonomously with no reliance on communications and manual control, and Brave1 assessed and cleared it for testing in Ukraine.
The plan is to use the new funding to double down on that with accelerated deployment in Ukraine, as well as R&D and ramping up its engineering team. Business development is following two lines: it’s looking to do more integrations with drone manufacturers, and it wants to expand into more European and NATO-aligned defence markets.
“Occam has moved exceptionally fast since its last round: from integration testing to frontline deployment, while more than tripling the team and contracting eight figures in revenue,” said Mikkel Strandkjær, investment manager at North Ventures. “What makes the company particularly compelling is its ability to scale in the field without being constrained by hardware manufacturing. The depth of its partnerships with Ukrainian OEMs and the military gives us real confidence in its path across Europe.”
Low-cost autonomy
The overall amount of spend on military-grade drones is going up in Europe — estimated at $6.4 billion this year, it will be growing at a compound rate annually of over 12% to 2031 to nearly $12 billion, says Markets and Markets. But as the rate of production and number of producers increase, the cost per drone is going down.
This presents an opportunity to those startups developing lower-cost solutions for different components to help drone makers and buyers be more competitive on pricing. This also lines up with what Occam thinks the demand is for these days:
“The battlefield doesn’t need expensive autonomy that works in a demo,” said said Gui Wainwright, co-founder and CEO of Occam Industries. “It needs systems that can be deployed at scale, keep working under jamming and GPS denial, and reduce the number of highly skilled pilots required to complete the mission.”
Running on low-cost compute, systems integrate through Occam Ludus. Ludus lets OEMs and military users combine autonomy modules and capabilities around their mission requirements and define how they are used. There is no hardware stack or OEM disruption, Occam said.
“That is what we built Occam to do: add effective and affordable autonomy to drones already being produced, without asking manufacturers to redesign the platform or build a new supply chain,” added Wainwright.
Occam’s technology is now undergoing active deployment and testing with multiple Ukrainian OEMs and military brigades. “That frontline feedback goes straight back into the product,” he said.
