Mutable Tactics, a robotics company developing a new approach to managing the operation of military drones, has secured a $2.1m (£1.57m) pre-seed investment.
While unmanned systems have become the norm for modern defence forces, Mutable Tactics claims the traditional operation of drones is bogged down by having a single operator controlling a single device at a time.
The London-based firm said with its technology it is enabling mixed fleets of drones to operate together in coordination, rather than as individually piloted platforms.
“Increasingly, the constraint is no longer hardware but human attention. We can deploy more drones than ever before, yet we still ask operators to control them one by one, often in environments where communications are unreliable,” said Mutable Tactics co-founder and chief executive Colin MacLeod.
“True autonomy breaks that one‑to‑one link, allowing humans to supervise and direct teams of systems rather than individual machines.
“That shift is essential for supporting modern military missions, where scale, speed and resilience matter, and where operators must remain focused on intent and outcomes rather than manual control.”
The company is building an AI-powered decision layer that sits between human operators and robotics, translating high-level command intent into locally executable actions.
Seraphim Space, an investment group that targets aerospace tech companies, led the pre-seed round that included support from the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Koro, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose.
“Mutable Tactics is building drone autonomy for modern conflicts: contested, jammed, and often GPS-denied environments,” said Seraphim Space’s principal Maureen Haverty.
“Most autonomy assumes clean communications and high-end platforms. Mutable’s software lets low-cost drones operate as coordinated teams when communications degrade, giving operators faster decisions and better outcomes without upgrading every platform.”
